When you think about C. S. Lewis and apologetics, what books come to mind? Most likely Mere Christianity, Miracles, or The Problem of Pain. These frontal attacks on modern skepticism do undoubtedly display the Oxford don’s brilliance as a defender of Christian faith. But it may surprise you to discover that Lewis didn’t view such blatant defenses as the most effective path to dismantling the skepticism he saw around him.
Lewis recommended another apologetics approach as “the first step” toward turning modern minds in the direction of Christian faith. If applied today, his suggestion could lead to shifts that seem, at first, counterintuitive. For one, it might result in fewer apologetics books and far more texts about topics that don’t directly relate to apologetics at all.
So how could less apologetics content possibly result in better apologetics? That’s one of the topics Lewis covered in “Christian Apologetics,” an address delivered in 1945 to a group of Anglican priests and youth ministry leaders. Building on his words in this lecture, I refer to his recommended approach as “latent apologetics.”
Attacking the Enemy’s Line of Communication
Reflecting on the apologetics addresses he gave to Royal Air Force personnel throughout Britain during World War II, Lewis lamented that, as soon as listeners left his lectures, they were plunged into contexts that assumed Christianity’s irrelevance. No matter how rational Christianity might have seemed during his talks, widespread embrace of Christian faith was “simply impossible,” Lewis suggested, as long as the implicit assumptions around the troops excluded Christianity from serious consideration.
The military personnel already doubted the truthfulness of ancient texts when they entered Lewis’s lectures, and they lacked any real sense of sin. But this wasn’t because they had consumed convincing content that promoted skeptical historiography or weak hamartiology. It was because they had absorbed their teachers’ assumptions that science is superior to history and sin is nothing more than a violation of social norms.
Lewis’s listeners also tended to be materialists, but not because they had studied books that argued for materialism. They became materialists, Lewis declared, because of “materialistic assumptions in all the other books.”
Supposing that Lewis was correct in his diagnosis of the modern mind, how should Christian thinkers respond to this challenge? Not by producing more defenses of Christian faith, according to Lewis. Our response should be instead to “attack the enemy’s line of communication.”
How should Christians go into battle against the Devil’s own communications strategy? By producing fewer explicitly Christian books, not more. “What we want is not more little books about Christianity,” Lewis declared, “but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”
‘What we want is not more little books about Christianity,’ Lewis declared, ‘but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.’
In Lewis’s vision, these “little books” wouldn’t explicitly promote Christian faith. Instead, the authors’ faith commitments would remain beneath the surface of rigorous research and argumentation. Here’s an analogy that Lewis deployed to explain this strategy:
Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. . . . In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble [the modern man]. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.
This proliferation of latent apologetics would be, according to Lewis, “the first step to the re-conversion of this country.”
Power of Latent Assumptions
The unspoken messages beneath the surface of texts may have mattered so much to Lewis because of his experiences of disowning and then returning to Christian faith—latent assumptions contributed to both.
When Lewis studied Greek and Roman myths as a teenager at Cherbourg House, his teachers and the editors of his textbooks took it for granted that “religious ideas were sheer illusion.” He wrote, “No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity.” Lewis recalled how he responded: “Little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief.” Thus Lewis understood from experience that the most effective attacks on faith don’t come through direct assault but through gradual erosion.
It’s not surprising, then, that Lewis responded so strongly against a textbook titled The Control of Language, which he described euphemistically as “the Green Book” in The Abolition of Man. The Control of Language was widely used in British schools to teach reading and writing, but it was doing far more than teaching the English language. The textbook’s latent assumptions were subverting the very possibility of virtue.
According to the authors of The Control of Language, moral declarations don’t describe any objective reality; they merely express the subjective emotional state of the speaker. The problem with this idea, as Lewis saw it, is that virtue formation requires reason to rule our appetites, but reason cannot rule our appetites unless our reason is grounded in some objective reality outside ourselves. Thus the latent assumptions in The Control of Language effectively eroded every possible foundation for the practice of virtue. Lewis wrote the lectures that became The Abolition of Man to counteract this suggestion.
But latent assumptions can work the other way as well. Texts rich with latent Christian truths played a significant role in drawing the adult Lewis toward historic Christianity. Certainly, conversations with friends such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson provided Lewis with explicit reasons to trust the truth of Christian faith. And yet, long before these conversations took place, latent truths hidden in the writings of George MacDonald and other religious writers were already preparing Lewis to consider Christianity despite his outward disbelief.
MacDonald’s works unmasked “the ludicrous contradiction” between Lewis’s resistance to religion and his passion for books in which Christian assumptions lurked beneath the surface. Eventually, God worked through the implicit assumptions in these texts to break through Lewis’s defenses, in much the same way that Lewis later hoped his own fairy stories would steal past the “watchful dragons” that have numbed modern minds to the deep potency of the Christian story.
Particularly in the final decade of his life, Lewis seems to have seen latent apologetics as his primary calling. When Carl F. H. Henry asked him to write an apologetics article for Christianity Today in 1955, Lewis replied, “If I am now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares—thro’ fiction and symbol. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but now I feel quite sure those days are over.”
Practice Latent Apologetics
So does the pursuit of latent apologetics mean that Christians should stop producing explicit defenses of their faith? No, and I don’t think that’s what Lewis was suggesting either. Lewis clearly recognized the value of both latent apologetics and more blatant defenses of Scripture and Christian faith, and he wrote books in both categories. J. I. Packer pointed out decades ago, “The battle for the Bible must continue as long as unbelieving babble about the Bible continues.”
At the same time, Lewis was right to highlight a possible omission in our approach to defending the faith. Filling this gap could produce a different set of priorities for the future of apologetics. The result could be less content that explicitly defends Christian faith and more content that defends it implicitly.
What Lewis specifically proposed as an apologetics strategy was a series of “little books” that could defeat “the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground.” The Rationalist Press Association had launched the Thinkers Library in 1929 to provide laypeople with inexpensive introductions to scientific and historical topics, penned primarily by atheists. By 1932, copies of Thinkers Library could be purchased at “every station bookstall” in England, according to Lewis. The authors rarely stated their atheism explicitly. Instead, they simply assumed atheism as a necessary framework for thoughtful scholarship. Penguin Books took a similar approach when they began publishing the Pelican imprint in 1937.
Texts rich with latent Christian truths played a significant role in drawing the adult Lewis toward historic Christianity.
The books in both series were simultaneously accessible and comprehensive, and the authors generally kept their antireligious assumptions beneath the surface. Although neither series is being published today, plenty of writers are still producing accessible and well-written books with implicit antireligious assumptions.
So what might be required to meet such books on their own ground, as Lewis proposed? Building on the vision Lewis provided in “Christian Apologetics,” I suggest a simple rubric for such works: They should be accessible and accurate yet not explicitly Christian.
1. Accessible and Accurate
The essence of Lewis’s strategy was “more little books by Christians on other subjects.” He specified “little books” because it was not only the content that mattered to him but also the comprehensibility.
One point that Lewis made repeatedly in his writings was that true experts in a field must be capable of writing for every educational level. “If you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused,” Lewis declared. The capacity to translate ideas into the vernacular was, for Lewis, one of the truest tests of the teacher’s own comprehension.
The primary danger Lewis glimpsed in the Thinkers Library wasn’t the authors’ atheism. It was the assumption of atheism in books penned for ordinary people and published at a price everyone could afford. The best response to these texts would be, according to Lewis, a flood of outstanding popular-level books written by Christians. Simply because the books would be written at a popular level shouldn’t mean, however, that they dilute complex truths or cherry-pick their facts. “Science twisted in the interests of apologetics,” Lewis contended, “would be sin and folly.”
But Lewis’s vision went beyond a surge of accessible and accurate books written by Christians. Lewis specifically called for little books “on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”
2. Not Explicitly Christian
If someone is intellectually gifted and interested in apologetics, it’s easy to assume he or she should pursue credentials in theology or biblical studies—and that’s not necessarily a wrong route. Some of these individuals probably should go to seminary. Yet many of them might exercise far more influence in the culture by writing on other subjects.
What if the church encouraged these individuals to consider earning advanced credentials in sociology or ethics or political science or marketing? And what if Christians saw that these fields are every bit as fruitful for apologetics as theology or biblical studies? It’s highly unlikely that Lewis would have been as influential as an apologist if he had been trained as a theologian instead of as a literary critic and philosopher, as he himself suggested in his “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger.”
Of course, I’m fully aware that faithful Christians are present throughout almost every field of study, and some—such as contemporary authors Allen Levi and Daniel Nayeri—do write books and articles that hint at their faith. Yet such individuals rarely see themselves as apologists.
What if churches began to treat these specialists as latent apologists? What if churches equipped them to consider the many ways they might place hints of their faith beneath the surface of their work? And what about Lewis’s idea for a series of accessible introductions to various disciplines, written by Christians, but with their Christianity latent and suitable for general usage? Would it be possible for a Christian publisher to launch an imprint of this sort?
Faithful Christians are present throughout almost every field of study. Yet they rarely see themselves as apologists. What if churches began to treat these specialists as latent apologists?
Extending this vision of latent apologetics further, what if Christian colleges trained students to produce outstanding poetry and literary essays with their Christianity latent? I recently taught an undergraduate class on Lewis’s apologetics. The students’ capstone project was an essay, short story, or poem that hinted at their faith without making it explicit. At the end of the semester, every student submitted his or her work to a literary journal for possible publication. My goal as I guided students through that process was for them to learn to practice latent apologetics.
What if some of the best work submitted to literary journals consistently came from Christians who know how to hint obliquely at the hope of Christ? Suppose a secular reader looks up the author of a poem or story that has directed his mind to something transcendent and beautiful, and that individual was surprised to discover a faithful Christian penned the work.
The practice of latent apologetics requires patient confidence that our efforts are always part of a process larger than we may see. Not every apologetics engagement needs to culminate in an altar call. Your responsibility may be to place an intellectual rock in someone’s shoe, a pebble of truth that chafes against her misplaced confidence in a godless cosmos.
That’s certainly what Lewis did throughout his literary works. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) only mentions Christ and Christianity as part of Lewis’s larger literary arguments, but the book effectively presses back against the modern myth of perpetual human progress. The only mention of Jesus Christ in the entirety of The Abolition of Man places Christ alongside Confucius as an exemplary external source for values. Although the book doesn’t even attempt any argument for theism or Christianity, Lewis manages to prepare the way for the gospel by skewering any possibility of purely subjective moral values.
The novel Till We Have Faces seems more pagan than Christian at first. And yet, in the end, this declaration from Orual hints at a deeply Christian response to the problems of evil, suffering, and divine silence: “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?” The book of Esther in the Bible never mentions God, yet it prepares the way for the gospel by telling a story that only makes sense if God rules the cosmos. That’s what latent apologetics does as well.
Of course, latent apologetics can never replace blatant apologetics. At some point, every Christian must unashamedly declare and defend the gospel. But latent apologetics has a place as well, particularly when it comes to raising doubts about defective worldviews and posing questions that the gospel alone can satisfy. This might result in fewer works of explicit apologetics but more implicit apologetics in unexpected places.
The Gospel Coalition