“All Find What They Truly Seek”: C. S. Lewis, Latter-day Saints, and the Virtuous Unbeliever

1. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 3 vols. edited by Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2004-6), Vol. 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931-1949, 670. Vol. 1 is subtitled Family Letters 1905-1931; Vol. 3 covers Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950-1963; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page. Lewis, a voluminous correspondent, frequently abbreviated common words.

2. Joseph Smith Jr. et al., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, edited by B. H. Roberts, 2d ed. rev., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1973 printing), 5:517. This particular sentence was added to the reconstruction of a Joseph Smith sermon on July 23, 1843, apparently in the handwriting of Jonathan Grimshaw, who may have been adding material recollected by George A. Smith. Grimshaw first wrote this: “Have the Presbyterians any truth? Embrace it. Have the Baptists, Methodists &c any truth? Embrace that. Get all the good in the world, and then you will come out a pure Mormon.”

3. Douglas LeBlanc, “Mere Mormonism: Journalist Richard Ostling Explores LDS Culture, Theology, and Fans of ‘Crypto-Mormon’ C. S. Lewis,” Christianity Today, February 7, 2000, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/february7/8.72.html (accessed April 12, 2010). Ostling also claims that Lewis “was aware of the LDS claims and totally rejected them,” which I believe is a significant overstatement. See Blair Dee Hodges, “C. S. Lewis: Crypto-Mormon? Part II: Lewis on Latter-day Saints,” http://www.lifeongoldplates.com/2009/05/c-s-lewis-crypto-mormon-part-ii-lewis.html, posted May 5, 2009. Ostling and his wife Joan co-wrote Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (New York: HarperOne, 1999).

4. Previous approaches have focused mainly on quotations from Lewis that resonate with an LDS audience. Often, Lewis is approved insofar as he is seen to agree with LDS perspectives. For instance, see Marianna Edwards Richardson and Christine Thackeray, C. S. Lewis: Latter-Day Truths in Narnia (Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort, 2008); Nathan Jensen, The Restored Gospel According to C. S. Lewis (Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort, 1998); Andrew C. Skinner and Robert L. Millet, eds., C. S. Lewis: The Man and His Message (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1999). Exceptions include Mary Jane Woodger, “The Words of C. S. Lewis as Used by the Leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Harvest Magazine, February, 2000 (discontinued), crlamppost.org/woodger.htm (accessed May 3, 2010); Evan Stephenson, “The Last Battle: C. S. Lewis and Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 30, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 43-69. The latter focuses mostly on areas of disagreement. My perspective differs only slightly from many of Stephenson’s conclusions.

5. See David Cloud, “C. S. Lewis and Evangelicals Today,” Way of Life Literature, August 12, 2008, http://www.wayoflife.org/files/2e66ace0fe4b2b419ec7f916702eabf6-134.html (accessed March 15, 2009); Trevor Thompson, “The Pervert, the Whip, and The Chronicles of Narnia,” Simon Magazine, December 14, 2005, http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/why_are_they_famous/01039_the_pervert_whip_the_chronicles_narnia.html (accessed March 15, 2009). See also A. N. Wilson’s controversial biography, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002) and the reply by George Sayers, Lewis’s pupil and friend, “C. S. Lewis and Adultery,” in We Remember C. S. Lewis: Essays and Memoirs, edited by David Graham (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman, 2001), 97-103.

6. Lewis once explained to his father how “correspondence is unhappily no true parallel to conversation: and it is just when one would be most ready for a talk in the odd hour of the day when one shoves ones [sic] work from one and lights the pipe of peace, that one is least ready to sit down and write a letter. I often wonder,” he added, “how the born letter writers whose ‘works’ fill volumes, overcame this difficulty.” Lewis, Collected Letters, 1:518. Lewis himself obviously overcame the difficulty. Even at three volumes, his letters are “collected” rather than “complete.”

7. Lewis, Collected Letters, 1:665. Lewis was corresponding with his father regarding The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh. Later, while reading the letters of Robert Southey, Lewis noted how reading letters written throughout one’s life can make a happy life look grimmer than it likely was, an appraisal of the incompleteness of such a record. Ibid., 2:421.

8. Lewis would be especially concerned that a student of journalism like me had written a paper using his letters, since he would not “hang a dog on a journalist’s evidence.” Lewis, Collected Letters, 2:849. Given Lewis’s frequent lambasting of journalists, the reader will have to take this paper for whatever it is worth. Ibid., 2:53, 849; 3:63, 114, 252, 410-11, 667, 786.

9. Ibid., 2:145. This overview of Lewis’s conversion is not comprehensive, for which the reader should see Roger Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, rev. ed. (New York: Harvest Books, 1994) and David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), and Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperOne, 2005). Because I focus more on Lewis’s conversion as he understood it, I omit many important events in Lewis’s environment which deserve consideration, for example, the early death of his mother, estrangement from his father, early dislike of school, being injured as a soldier in World War I, losing friends in battle, a possible sexual relationship with an older woman, Mrs. Moore, and other influential experiences.

10. Sociologists and psychologists have attempted to craft various “stages of faith,” many of which tend to play favorites regarding how one should be converted and to what. For one example, see James Fowler, Stages of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). An interesting response to such efforts (which also informed my interpretation of Lewis’s conversion) is Susan Kwilecki, “A Scientific Approach to Religious Development: Proposals and a Case Illustration,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 27, no. 3 (September 1988): 307-25. Kwilecki is a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford University.

11. Kwilecki, “A Scientific Approach to Religious Development,” 310. In some faith traditions, such development is believed to be instantaneous; for example, some Evangelical Christians seek a vivid moment in which they are “saved” or “born again.”

12. George MacDonald (1824-1905), Unspoken Sermons (1867-89; rpt. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 102. Clive Staples Lewis, ed., George MacDonald: An Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 18, said he regarded MacDonald as his “master”: “My own debt to [Unspoken Sermons] is almost as great as one man can owe to another. … Indeed, I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation.”

13. Upon reading these early letters years later, Lewis was most struck by their “egotism” and “priggery.” “I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter. … How ironical that the very thing wh. I was proud of in my letters then should make the reading of them a humiliation to me now!” (1:973). This mortification seems to have carried over into his reading of The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Perhaps there was something autobiographical in his remark: “One can see quite clearly that having so early acquired the talk [Macaulay] found he could go on quite comfortably for the rest of his life without bothering to notice the things. He was from the first clever enough to produce a readable and convincing slab of claptrap on any subject whether he understood it or not, and hence he never to his dying day discovered that there was such a thing as understanding” (1:815).

14. Lewis often quoted verses from both the Old and New Testaments. At times the quotations were straightforward with no positive or negative spin. His letters demonstrate an impressive early acquaintance with the Bible.

15. Lewis and Arthur were clearly bibliophiles, often discussing books in great detail, including their physical dimensions, construction, and quality. They favored “Everyman” editions, which could be ordered with a custom color binding. In the letter mentioning Phantastes, Lewis reported that he recently purchased a volume in the chocolate binding he used to dislike. “So you see I am gradually becoming converted to all your views,” he teased. “Perhaps one of these days you may even make a Christian of me” (1:170-71).

16. MacDonald greatly influenced Lewis’s later approach to writing fiction.

17. Lewis was reading books on William Morris and later viewed this stage of his belief as something like “pantheism” or other “sub-Xtian beliefs” (1:342 note 146; 2:702).

18. After his conversion, Lewis maintained that refuting should include replacing if possible. When Elizabeth Anscombe rebutted Lewis’s argument that “Naturalism is Self-Refuting,” he noted: “The lady is quite right to refute what she thinks bad theistic arguments, but does this not almost oblige her as a Christian to find good ones in their place: having obliterated me as an Apologist ought she not to succeed me?” (3:35).

19. Some biographers have pointed to Lewis’s early discomfort with prayer as key in his loss of faith. See Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert, 44, 132. Significantly, Lewis later wrote a book on the subject: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964). Earlier, he had abandoned an effort to write this book (3:276, 428).

20. Anglican New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “Simply Lewis,” Touchstone Magazine, March 2007, complained: “I don’t know whether it’s Lewis or his republishers, but I am puzzled that such a great writer should have been so indiscriminate and seemingly muddled with his use of the colon and semi-colon.” From the letters, I am confident Lewis was responsible.

21. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 160. Lewis felt “deserted” by his friends following their conversion. Several collected letters contain advice to recent converts struggling with unbelieving loved ones. This idea later informed Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces which he describes as “the story of every nice, affectionate agnostic whose dearest one suddenly ‘gets religion‘” (3:590; see also 2:482-83).

22. As an alternative to Madame Blavatsky’s “Theosophy” movement, Rudolph Steiner founded the official Anthroposophy Society in 1912. Goetheanum, the school of spiritual science and current seat of the society near Basel, Switzerland, currently claims 150,000 annual visitors. For Steiner’s works, see rsarchive.org.

23. Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis’s Great War with Owen Barfield (Victoria, British Columbia: Ink Books, 2000).

24. Lewis told one worried writer to disregard charges that believers were suffering from a deluded “escapism,” calling such people “Turnkey critics: people who want to keep the world in some ideological prison because a glimpse at any remote prospect wd. make their stuff seem less exclusively important” (3:418). Though not opposed to scientific investigation, Lewis was annoyed by “Scientocracy,” glossing Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven & earth than are dreamed of in your science” (3:1104, 623-24). Christians should be especially wary of twisting the gospel into “one more of their high brow fads” (2:134). Pinning too much faith on any currently popular philosophical trend (in this case, Neo-scholasticism,) could be dangerous: “I mean, we have no abiding city even in philosophy: all passes, except the Word” (2:176).

25. G. K. Chesterton was one of the Christian writers who seems to have impacted Lewis most. Before his conversion, Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 216, viewed Chesterton as “the most sensible man alive ‘apart from his Christianity.‘” In 1947 after converting, he called Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man “the v. best popular defence of the full Christian position” he knew (2:823; 3:72). He often listed it in letters when asked for recommendations (2:375, 941; 3:363, 652, 1,264, 1,353).

26. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 216.

27. Lewis later found some of the psalms troubling, especially those appearing to manifest vindictiveness and a “festering, gloating, undisguised” hatred. He wrote Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 1, 22, to help readers understand these troublesome aspects, though he insisted he was not writing as a Hebraist or higher critic.

28. Lewis would later urge patience with clergymen: “We have a very trying curate in our parish,” he explained. “Some say ‘the devil lives v. near the altar’, [and] I take it your Rector is just an instance of the brother one has to forgive unto seventy times seven.” He concluded, “If they have a bad priest they need good laity all the more” (3:463).

29. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 228-29. He noted that God’s willingness to accept him despite this attitude is a witness to God’s remarkable mercy. Notably, Lewis’s father passed away during this time.

30. Lewis could not date “the ride to Whipsnade” (3:996). According to Walter Hooper, Lewis’s brother recorded the date in his journal as September 28, 1931 (3:996; 1:972). This revelation took place days after a very influential late-night conversation with friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien. As a theist, Lewis had been puzzled by the “whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world.” Dyson and Tolkien convinced Lewis to view the story of Christ as he viewed other similar myths involving death, sacrifice, and propitiation. Lewis realized that “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened . . .[,] the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. . . . Does this amount to a belief in Christianity?” (1:976-77).

31. He is quoting Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, which Lewis claims is the only biography he ever enjoyed reading. He quoted from it often; the ‘ignorance’ line was something of a running gag (3:26).

32. See, e.g., 2:481, 975; 3:66, 562. In 1941 he thanked one reader for her kind letter, concluding, “Though I’m forty years old as a man I’m only about twelve as a Christian, so it would be a maternal act if you found time sometimes to mention me in your prayers” (2:263-64). To a priest who wrote Lewis in 1947 to ask for help in resolving denominational conflict, Lewis responded: “I am a layman, indeed the most lay of laymen, and least skilled in the deeper questions of sacred theology. I have tried to do the only thing that I think myself able to do: that is, to leave completely aside the subtler questions about which the Roman Church and Protestants disagree among themselves . . . and in my own books to expound, rather, those things which still, by God’s grace, after so many sins and errors, are shared by us” (2:801); translation from Lewis’s Latin original, and hence his title for Mere Christianity.

33. Lewis quoted Alexander Pope: “His praise is lost who stays till all commend” (3:75).

34. Sheldon Vanauken (1914-96) was an American author whose autobiography discusses love, conversion, and tragedy. See Vanaukin, A Severe Mercy: C. S. Lewis and a Pagan Love Invaded by Christ, Told by One of the Lovers (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977).

35. Seeming discrepancies between Paul’s writings and the Gospels are being studied in light of the “new perspective on Paul.” See, e.g., N. T. Wright, “New Perspectives on Paul,” 10th Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference: August 25-28, 2003, http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_New_Perspectives.htm (accessed April 29, 2009). For a diverging interpretation of how Lewis understood the interplay of grace, faith, and works, see Will Vaus, Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004), chaps. 4, 10.

36. According to Paul Kuntz, More was interested largely in dualism and concluded that “Spirit depends on matter and needs corporeal instruments, while matter adapts itself to spiritual purposes,” Paul Grimley Kuntz, “The Dualism of Paul Elmer More,” Religious Studies 16, no. 4 (December 1980): 400. More’s thought has interesting similarities to Lewis’s. For example, he believed that all humans will feel a “ubiquitous sense that somehow something is wrong with existence and that somehow the wrong can be, and ought to be, escaped.” More, The Catholic Faith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1931), 8. Like Lewis he believed that truth and goodness could be found in many faith traditions; and although he believed Christianity was the “Truth,” he borrowed thought from the East in Buddhism, Hinduism, and also from Western thought in Plato. The Dharma, as well as the Dialogues, was a “preface to the gospel,” and Gautama Buddha and Plato “would have accepted Christ.” “Kuntz, The Dualism of Paul Elmer More,” 400. See the full article, ibid., 389-411. Similarly, Lewis’s Christianity could easily pick up where the Tao leaves off: “Have you read the Analects of Confucius? He ends up by saying ‘This is the Tao. I do not know if any one has ever kept it.‘ That’s significant: one can really go direct from there to the Epistle to the Romans” (3:72; 2:561).

37. For Lewis’s understanding of Idealism, see Surprised by Joy, chap. 13

38. Lewis’s affinity with MacDonald can be seen in his use of metaphors like this one. MacDonald repeatedly used imagery of a mountain and valley to represent higher states of spiritual knowledge. For example, to explain why Christ didn’t answer the young rich man more directly in Matthew 19, MacDonald reasoned: “To begin with [the ultimate answer] would be as sensible as to say to one asking how to reach the top of some mountain, ‘Just set your foot on that shining snow-clad peak, high there in the blue, and you will at once be where you wish to go.‘” MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 71. Whether Lewis was derivative here or whether the men simply reasoned alike deserves further exploration; when one quotes Lewis, who is Lewis quoting? Not likely many of his contemporaries. He often admitted his neglect of any “modern” theologians, poets, and writers. In 1955 he wrote: “I am v. ill acquainted with modern theological literature having seldom found it helpful. One book did a great deal for me: G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. But I can’t give you such a list as you want” (3:652).

39. More traveled his own interesting path from Manichaeism into a dualism that attempted to reconcile spirit and matter in the paradox of Christ’s incarnation. This path led through Hindu views to Platonic dualism to Christianity, among other places. Kuntz, “The Dualism of Paul Elmer More,” 394.

40. Lewis, “Christianity and Culture,” Theology 40 (March 1940): 177, commented: “Culture is not everyone’s road into Jerusalem, and for some it is a road out” (2:332-33). Although the quotation is from Lewis, it is from an article, added as a transition between two letters.

41. Griffiths was one of the three theologians Lewis asked to critique his radio broadcasts before delivering them (2:496, 498, 502-3).

42. David Paulsen, “What Does It Mean to Be Christian? The Views of Joseph Smith and Søren Kierkegaard,” BYU Studies 47, no. 4 (2008): 55-91, compares and contrasts Søren Kierkegaard and Joseph Smith’s radical critiques of nineteenth-century Christian culture.

43. Quoted in Dean C. Jessee, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820-1844, edited by John W. Welch and Erick B. Carlson (Provo, Utah: BYU Press /Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 1-33.

44. Ibid.; emphasis mine. See also John 3:17, which receives less attention than the preceding verse: “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” The references to apostasy in Joseph’s First Vision accounts should be tempered by this information even as the First Vision story is understood in different contexts for different purposes. See James B. Allen, “The Significance of Joseph Smith’s ‘First Vision’ in Mormon Thought,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1, no. 3 (Fall 1966): 29-45. Incidentally, the same contextual issues can be raised regarding Lewis, whose book (as noted above) could be called “suppressed by Jack” according to some friends. Lewis emphasizes different aspects of his conversion for different audiences and to different ends. But would this attention to his correspondent call into question the overall veracity of his experience?

45. James B. Allen discusses the various accounts considering different contexts and differing purposes in “Emergence of a Fundamental: The Expanding Role of Joseph Smith’s First Vision in Mormon Religious Thought,” Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): 43.

46. Gordon B. Hinckley, “The BYU Experience,” BYU Speeches, November 4, 1997, http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=2973 (accessed April 2, 2010).

47. Joseph Smith, discourse, January 22, 1843, reported by Wilford Woodruff, in History of the Church, 5:259.

48. Rhetoric regarding the apostasy of Christendom was frequent in LDS missionary efforts. LDS views of the apostasy were more formally presented in works like Apostle James E. Talmage’s The Great Apostasy (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1909) which closely followed Protestant narratives of Christian history. LDS scholarship on the apostasy has become more sophisticated and nuanced over time. A good example is Noel B. Reynolds, ed., Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2005). In another effort to foster ecumenical outreach, a Mormon chapter of the Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy was recently formed. “Mormon Diplomacy Chapter Created,” Deseret News, April 23, 2009, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705299039/Mormon-Times-briefing.html (accessed April 24, 2009. This development is interesting, especially in light of past statements like that of Royden G. Derrick of the presidency of the First Quorum of the Seventy: “We cannot join any ecumenical movement, for if we do so, we will be required to compromise principles. We cannot do that, for the Lord has established the principles upon which his church is built, and we have no right to change them.” Derrick, “Valiance in the Drama of Life,” Ensign, May 1983, 23. The Church has not officially sanctioned the Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy. Several BYU professors belong to the founding board. The Church has joined in various causes with other religions since 1983, most recently urging members to support and help finance California’s Proposition 8 (2008). “Protect-Marriage” was not an ecumenical movement but consisted of various faith traditions working toward a common goal. See newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/same-sex-marriage-and-proposition-8 (accessed April 1, 2010).

49. David L. Paulsen, “The Search for Cultural Origins of Mormon Doctrines,” in Excavating Mormon Pasts: The New Historiography of the Last Half Century, edited by Newell G. Bringhurst and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2004), 50. Many Mormons have found such “truths” in Lewis’s works.

50. Lewis says he “jolly well hope[s]” God sends “uncovenanted mercies. …After all[,] non-existent Gods, if appealed to with good heart, probably have done quite a lot: the real God, of His infinite courtesy, re-addresses the letters to Himself and they are dealt with like the rest of the mail” (3:478).

51. See, e.g., David Cloud, “Beware of C. S. Lewis,” Fundamental Baptist Information Service, March 1, 2002; David J. Stewart, “C. S. Lewis: Exposed!”, both http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Wolves/cs_lewis-exposed.htm (accessed April 1, 2009). I suppose Lewis’s declarations about “false gods” are not enough for some, though these comments would likely sound offensive to those worshipping those “gods.” Lewis typically reserved harsher phraseology for personal correspondence. See note 55.

52. Brigham Young, December 3, 1854, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool and London: LDS Booksellers Depot, 1855-86), 2:139. Accepting truth wherever found was a recurring theme in Young’s sermons: “It is our duty and calling, as ministers of the same salvation and Gospel, to gather every item of truth and reject every error. Whether a truth be found with professed infidels, or with the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects and parties, all of whom have more or less truth, it is the business of the Elders of this Church . . . to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the Gospel we preach, to mechanism of every kind, to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever it may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, and bring it to Zion. The people upon this earth have a great many errors, and they have also a great many truths. This statement is not only true of the nations termed civilized—those who profess to worship the true God, but is equally applicable to pagans of all countries, for in their religious rights [sic] and ceremonies may be found a great many truths which we will also gather home to Zion. All truth is for the salvation of the children of men—for their benefit and learning—for their furtherance in the principles of divine knowledge; and divine knowledge is any matter of fact—truth; and all truth pertains to divinity.” Young, October 9, 1859, ibid., 7:283-84. Future Church president John Taylor, June 12, 1853, 1:155, similarly stated: “I was going to say I am not a Universalist, but I am, and I am also a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic, and a Methodist, in short, I believe in every true principle that is imbibed by any person or sect, and reject the false. If there is any truth in heaven, earth, or hell, I want to embrace it, I care not what shape it comes in to me, who brings it, or who believes in it, whether it is popular or unpopular. Truth, eternal truth, I wish to float in and enjoy.” LDS emphasis on ecumenism has ebbed and flowed over time.

53. For thoughts on religious flexibility versus rigidity, see Richard D. Poll, “What the Church Means to People Like Me,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 2 (Winter 1967); 107-17, and his “Liahona and Iron Rod Revisited,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 16 (Summer 1983): 69-78.

54. Lewis often wondered how the Christian gospel could ever take hold in the East given the cultural disconnect (3:408).

55. When discussing whether it was “lawful for a Christian to bear arms,” Lewis appealed to the New Testament, St. Augustine, and the “general agreement of all Christian communities except a few odd sects—who generally combine pacifism with other odd opinions” (2:233-34). Lewis, like some Latter-day Saints, was not always cordial in his comments about other faiths. Anthroposophy was mostly “nonsense” (3:199), Hindus undoubtedly worshipped “false gods” (3:1300), and he was not particularly welcoming to Catholic “papalism,” theology of cremation, the “B.V.M.” (Blessed Virgin Mary), and transubstantiation (2:358, 646-47).

56. History of the Church, 6:57, punctuation modernized, discourse by Joseph Smith, October 15, 1843. Joseph asserted that “the most prominent difference in sentiment between the Latter-day Saints and sectarians was, that the latter were all circumscribed by some particular creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained therein, whereas the Latter-day Saints have no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.” History of the Church, 5:215; the sentence appears in this form in “History of the Church” Manuscript Book D-1, p. 1433, LDS Church History Library. Joseph also stated: “The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.” Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), 458.

57. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1980), 319. Coincidentally, Terryl L. Givens quotes C. S. Lewis soon after this same Joseph Smith quotation in his “Joseph Smith: Prophecy, Process, and Plentitude,” in Joseph Smith: Reappraisals after Two Centuries, edited by Reid L. Neilson and Terryl L. Givens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 110, 112.

58. On this question, Lewis usually cited the fact that the Lord Himself drank wine (e.g., 3:608) and that “abstinence from liquor” was “unscriptural and erroneous doctrine” (3:1,126). The Word of Wisdom is predicated on the existence of new revelation through living prophets, an objectionable premise for those who grant final authority to the Bible, creeds, or Early Church Fathers.

59. Such an appeal to “common ground” is problematic, as there are still some significant differences between mainstream denominations who adhere to the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds. Lewis was aware of such divisions, telling one priest that “the schism in the Body of Christ is both a source of grief and a matter of prayers, being a most serious stumbling block to those coming in and one which makes even the faithful even weaker in repelling the common foe” (2:801). For this reason he often refused to engage in minor doctrinal squabbles: “When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground.” He characterized his refusal to debate this particular point as “abstaining from one tree in the whole garden” (2:136).

60. Roger R. Keller, former minister and current professor of Church history at Brigham Young University, recounted his family’s spiritual experiences predating Mormonism in “Do I Know My Neighbor?,” Ensign, March 1991, 25-28: “We had been clearly shown a continuity between the Holy Ghost we knew as Presbyterians and the Holy Ghost we experienced as Latter-day Saints. Thus, we have never questioned whether we walked with God in our previous vocation of ministry or whether the Lord had led us to that ministry on our path to the fulness of the gospel. We had been shown clearly that there was definitely more to the Christian faith than we had previously known. It was, and still is, offensive to us that these sacred post-baptism experiences are construed by some as proving our superiority over family and friends who did not wish to join us in our decision. In order to avoid this doctrinally unfounded approach and better understand our relationship as Latter-day Saints to our other-denominational friends and neighbors, we need to be aware of their role in the Restoration. Above all, we need to acknowledge the invaluable contributions our Christian neighbors have made, and continue to make, in furthering the Lord’s work on the earth.”

61. See also 2 Nephi 2:21: “And the days of the children of men were prolonged, according to the will of God, that they might repent while in the flesh; wherefore, their state became a state of probation, and their time was lengthened, according to the commandments which the Lord God gave unto the children of men.” If the “night of darkness” is seen as beginning at mortal death, those who heard about the restored gospel during mortality but did not accept it are in danger of not reaching the highest advancement God offers.

62. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 65-66.

63. Bruce R. McConkie, “The Seven Deadly Heresies,” Brigham Young University Devotional Speeches of the Year (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1981), http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6770 (accessed February 10, 2010).

64. Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, edited by Bruce R. McConkie, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1955 (1954-56), 2:134; emphasis mine. Other LDS leaders have emphasized the difficulty of repenting after death—but “difficult” is not “impossible.” Elder Melvin J. Ballard, Three Degrees of Glory (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1922), 14-15, stated: “We are sentencing ourselves to long periods of bondage, separating our spirits from our bodies, or we are shortening that period, according to the way in which we overcome and master ourselves.” President Spencer W. Kimball quoted Ballard’s statement, then added, “Clearly it is difficult to repent in the spirit world of sins involving physical habits and actions. There one has spirit and mind but not the physical power to overcome a physical habit.” Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1969), 168. These quotations typically refer directly to Alma 34:32-35. Matthew Roper and John A. Tvedtnes provide another interpretation of these verses in “Scripture Insight: ‘Do Not Procrastinate the Day of Your Repentance,‘” Insights (FARMS newsletter) 20:10, n.d. http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/insights/?vol=20&num=10&id=160 (accessed March 29, 2010).

65. A more current view from a more “official” source is “Chapter 35: Redemption for the Dead,” in the Relief Society/Priesthood instruction manual, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 2007), 401-11. Parsing official from unofficial LDS doctrine is difficult. The Church’s most recent statement is “Approaching Mormon Doctrine,” LDS Newsroom, May 4, 2007, http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/approaching-mormon-doctrine (accessed February 10, 2010).

66. This scripture demonstrates the difficulty of formulating a systematic theology using scriptural proof-texts. Because Latter-day Saints believe that God reveals His will “line upon line” in different dispensations and circumstances, taking a snapshot of any moment in scripture could mislead. This canonized flexibility is described in Alma 29:8: “For behold, the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have; therefore we see that the Lord doth counsel in wisdom, according to that which is just and true” (emphasis mine). Alma 40 discusses his own uncertainty about certain aspects of the afterlife, thus canonizing some prophetic speculation and uncertainty. Quoting The Problem of Pain as though it were Lewis’s final view would be a mistake considering the greater fluidity of his views in his letters.

67. Grant Underwood, “‘Saved or Damned’: Tracing a Persistent Protestantism in Early Mormon Thought,” BYU Studies 25, no. 3 (1985): 85-103, notes that Section 76 (“The Vision”) “was not initially appreciated for its revolutionary significance.” Even Joseph Smith seldom mentioned it. Early Mormon thought on the afterlife resembled Protestantism’s emphasis of salvation or damnation, heaven or hell. Brigham Young, June 21, 1874, Journal of Discourses, 18:247, recalled: “I was not prepared to say that I believed it, and I had to wait. What did I do? I handed this over to the Lord in my feelings, and said I, ‘I will wait until the Spirit of God manifests to me, for or against.‘ I did not judge the matter, I did not argue against it, not in the least. I never argued the least against anything Joseph proposed, but if I could not see or understand it, I handed it over to the Lord.”

68. This section and Section 138 regarding missionary work in the spirit world were added to the Doctrine in Covenants in 1981. Robert J. Woodford, “Doctrine and Covenants Editions,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 1:426.

69. Brigham Young, August 8, 1852, Journal of Discourses, 3:91. Early Mormons expected the Millennium to arrive quite soon. Underwood, “Saved or Damned,” 91.

70. Lewis joked that he and Tolkien agreed: “[Just] as some people at school … are eminently kickable, so Williams is eminently combustible” (2:283).

71. Over time LDS leaders have employed the same verse: (1) to justify few converts, (2) to underscore the “great apostasy” and consequent need for restored LDS authority, (3) to encourage missionaries discouraged by few converts, and (4) to create tension before explaining the doctrines of vicarious ordinances.

72. Lewis is quoting Dom Bede Griffiths, “Catholicism To-day,” Pax: The Quarterly Review of the Benedictines of Prinknash. Though Lewis agreed with the sentiment, he thought Griffiths’s argument needed further clarification: “All are saved by Christ or not at all, I agree. But I wonder ought you to make clearer what you mean by His Grace coming ‘by way of the Natural Law‘—or any other Law. We are absolutely at one about the universality of the Nat. Law, and its objectivity, and its Divine origin. But can one just leave out the whole endless Pauline reiteration of the doctrine that Law, as such, cannot be kept and serves in fact to make sin exceedingly sinful [Rom. 7:12-13]?” One could not be saved apart from Christ, in Lewis’s view, whether His grace is received through the “Natural Law” or otherwise. In Mere Christianity, chaps. 1-5, Lewis appeals to the very existence of the natural law as indicating that something is behind it—namely, God. All are convicted by the natural law because no one perfectly obeys its moral demands. Lewis believed that the New Testament preaches repentance and forgiveness which “assumes an audience who already believe in the Law of Nature and know they have disobeyed it.” He feared that “modern England” was quickly losing belief in natural law so most New Testament “apologetic begins a stage too far on. The first step is to create, or recover, the sense of guilt” (2:470).

73. Thomas Aquinas, Collationes in Decem Praeceptis, 1. From Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 426; see also Rom. 2:14-15.

74. D&C 93:31-32: “Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man; because that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light. And every man whose spirit receiveth not the light is under condemnation.”

75. The virtuous unbeliever is similar to the “Anonymous Christian” idea articulated by Karl Rahner, the Jesuit theologian who played an important role in the concept’s becoming official Catholic doctrine during Vatican II. Karl Rahner, “Religious Inclusivism,” Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, edited by Michael Peterson et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Thus to the catechism was added: “Those who through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Burns & Oates, 2002), 196-97. Some view this addition as unbiblical and too inclusive while others see it as parochial and offensive to other faiths. See Stephen M. Clinton, “Peter, Paul and the Anonymous Christian: A Response to the Mission Theology of Karl Rahner and Vatican II,” Orlando Institute Leadership Forum, November 1998, Evangelical Theological Society, www.toi.edu/Resources/Anonomous2.pdf (accessed April 15, 2009).

76. Bruce R. Reichenbach, “Inclusivism and the Atonement,” Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 16, no. 1 (January 1999): 43-54, succinctly phrased this approach: “One can appropriate something subjectively without knowing how it is achieved objectively. … Salvation or liberation is possible [for people], though they do not know or have a mistaken notion of the exact circumstances whereby the merits of Christ’s death are made available.” John Sanders distinguishes the ontological versus the epistemological necessity of Christ’s atonement in No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Fate of the Unevangelized (1992; rpt., Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 30. This book is an excellent overview of Christian thought on the fate of virtuous unbelievers from three main positions that he classifies as restrictivism, universalism, and “wider hope.” Lewis receives a detailed treatment on 251-57. Unfortunately, Sanders overlooks LDS thought in this book.

77. Lewis added his own footnote to “Hell” in this letter, distinguishing “Hades, the land of the dead” from “Gehenna, the land of the lost” (3:163). D&C 19 describes hell as a place or condition that exists eternally but which will end for certain individuals.

78. Lewis also stated: “If the Church is Christ’s body,—the thing he works through—then the more worried one is about the people outside, the more reason to get inside oneself where one can help—you are giving Him, as it were, a new finger” (2:499). Lewis had been working on the radio broadcasts at this time and uses the same example there. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 65.

79. There is a period after the “a” but not after the “b”. Clinton, “Peter, Paul and the Anonymous Christian,” 13 note 126, ends his critique of Rahner by appealing to a more concerted Christian missionary effort and declaring that the “anonymous Christian” idea is unbiblical and thus false.

80. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, Vol. 7 in THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA (London: HarperCollins, 2001 printing), 757. Applying a coherent theory of the Atonement to the inclusivist approaches of Lewis and Latter-day Saints is beyond the scope of this paper. Reichenbach, “Inclusivism and the Atonement,” discusses religious inclusivism’s relation to sin and atonement theory. How are the effects of Christ’s atonement actually available to someone who is ignorant of its occurrence? This problem exists for various atonement models (including the moral exemplar model); how can one follow an example or be encouraged or helped by something one never heard about? LDS thought posits a universal Light of Christ, posthumous missionary work, and proxy ordinances as part of the solution. Reichenbach concludes that if God truly discerns the hearts of His children, any person might employ functionally equivalent repentance techniques, though the concepts or language they employ may seem foreign to Christians. For Atonement theories in LDS thought, see Blake T. Ostler, The Problems with Theism and the Love of God, Vol. 2 in EXPLORING MORMON THOUGHT (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2006).

81. The “grace and works” debate is beyond the scope of this article. The role of “intelligence” (not “intelligences”) in LDS soteriology should be kept in mind. Joseph Smith emphasized: “A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge,” quoted by Wilford Woodruff, discourse, April 10, 1842, History of the Church, 4:588. This statement was canonized as: “And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come” (D&C 130:19). This scripture emphasizes diligence and obedience as methods of gaining knowledge. Ultimately, correct belief on less than “weightier matters” can be acquired even beyond the veil. Joseph Smith taught: “When you climb up a ladder, you must begin at the bottom, and ascend step by step, until you arrive at the top; and so it is with the principles of the Gospel—you must begin with the first, and go on until you learn all the principles of exaltation. But it will be a great while after you have passed through the veil before you will have learned them.” History of the Church, 6:306-7.

82. See Harvest Mission Ministries, http://harvestgathering.org/page_83.html (accessed March 30, 2009). While discussing literary critics who have a similar narrow approach to anything that does not suit their fancy, Lewis quoted Alexander Pope: “Thus Wit, like Faith, by each man is applied/ To one small sect, and all are damned beside” (2:734).

83. For the most comprehensive response to the charge that Mormons worship a “different Jesus,” see Daniel C. Peterson and Stephen D. Ricks, “Offenders for a Word”: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1998).

84. Mosiah 2:17: “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.”

85. He added: “But in the main we are not told God’s plans about them in any detail” (2:499). Latter-day Saints believe that they have received additional revelation concerning their fate. (See below.) Lewis referred to the parable of the sheep and goats several times. For instance, when asked about the scripture “He who has not the Son has not the father” (1 John 5:12), he responded: “[It] must mean, I think, he who wholly lacks the Spirit of the Son. Those who do not recognize Him as the Son of God may nevertheless ‘have’ Him in a saving sense—as the ‘Sheep’ had in the parable of the sheep and goats” (3:1447; see also 3:163).

86. Dallin H. Oaks, “The Challenge to Become,” Ensign, November 2000, 32-34, http://www.lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-138-15,00.html (accessed March 30, 2010).

87. Joseph Fielding Smith, comp. and ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (1938; Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1954 printing), 218.

88. Oaks, “The Challenge to Become.”

89. Blair Dee Hodges, “C. S. Lewis: Crypto-Mormon? Part I: Latter-day Saints on Lewis,” posted May 5, 2009, http://www.lifeongoldplates.com/2009/04/c-s-lewis-crypto-mormon-part-i-latter.html.

90. Oaks, “The Challenge to Become.”

91. Latter-day Saints often differentiate between “salvation” and “exaltation,” the former being granted in certain degrees to all of God’s children, the latter being predicated on accepting and living the gospel. Exaltation is granted to those in the celestial kingdom. Margaret McConkie Pope, “Exaltation,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 2:479.

92. Lorenzo Snow, fifth LDS Church president, said: “Missionary work is more successful in spirit prison than on earth. A wonderful work is being accomplished in our temples in favor of the spirits in prison. I believe strongly, too, that when the gospel is preached to the spirits in prison, the success attending that preaching will be far greater than that attending the preaching of our elders in this life.” Quoted in Lorenzo Snow, The Teachings of Lorenzo Snow, edited by Clyde J. Williams (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984), 98.

93. Elma Fugal, “Salvation of the Dead,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 3:1257-59: “The performing of earthly ordinances by proxy for those who have died is as efficacious and vitalizing as if the deceased person had done them. That person, in turn, is free to accept or reject the ordinances in the spirit world.”

94. Vatican II’s acceptance of the idea resulted in the defection of the Society of St. Paul Pius X, which called such inclusion “a very grave doctrinal error because it declares personal justification as being already realized for every man without any participation of his will or free choice and, so, without any need of his conversion, faith, baptism or works.” Society of St. Pius X, Australian District, “Errors of Vatican II,” Si Si No No, No. 52 (May 2003), http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/SiSiNoNo/2003_May/errors_of_vatican_II.htm (accessed March 30, 2010). The LDS view retains the necessity of ordinances and works coupled with Christ’s grace as requirements for all. Thus, the LDS position cuts through objections to Karl Rahner’s anonymous Christian concept.