Barry's Blog

Ken Burns' World World II documentary, The War, continues to receive critical acclaim as it airs on PBS television stations across America this week. I've been struck by the remarkable footage and commentary in the episodes, as we are captivated by the pictures and sounds to get a close hand look at the devastating loss and pain that war brings to the soldiers and their families. Similarly, who can fathom such remarkable bravery and heroism as was displayed by so many men and women?

Many people are surprised to learn that C.S. Lewis's bestselling book defending the Christian faith, Mere Christianity, which has sold over 100 million copies and been translated into over 41 languages, was originally given as a series of radio broadcast talks over the BBC during the War. It all began when J.W. Welch, Director of the BBC's Religious Broadcasting Department, wrote to Lewis to thank him for the help he had been given by his book, The Problem of Pain, asking him if he would be willing to help in their work of religious broadcasting at the BBC. Lewis agreed, and gave the initial four, fifteen minute talks ‘live' over the air in London every Wednesday evening in August, 1941, from 7:45-8:00 p.m. The first talks were entitled, "Right or Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe." The subject of these talks was what is generally referred to as Natural Law, which Lewis called in the first talk, "The Law of Human Nature."

These four series of twenty-five broadcast talks, which were delivered between 1941-1944, were initially published as three separate books, The Case for Christianity (1943), Christian Behavior (1943), and Beyond Personality (1945) and collected into Mere Christianity, which was published in 1952. Lewis's words of Christian conviction and hope would prove to be a great comfort as his voice would become the second-most recognized voice in England to that of Winston Churchill.

As a young man, Lewis had served in the awful trenches of World War I, and in 1940, when the bombing of Britain began, he had taken up duties as an air raid warden and gave talks to men in the Royal Air Force, who knew that after just thirteen bombing missions, most of them would be declared dead or missing. And the evacuation of over a million children to the English countryside due to the bombing of  London would serve as the setting for his inaugural book in his Chronicles of Narnia series. Lewis knew well the anguish and ravages of war.

In her excellent Foreword to the present HarperCollins edition of Mere Christianity, Kathleen Norris wryly notes observes: "All of our notions of modernity and progress and all our advances in technological expertise have not brought an end to war. Our declaring the notion of sin to be obsolete has not diminished human suffering...the problem, C.S. Lewis insists, is us. And the crooked and perverse generation of which the psalmists and prophets spoke many thousands of years ago is our own. The Christianity Lewis espouses is humane, but not easy: it asks us to recognize that the great religious struggle is not fought on a spectacular battleground, but within the ordinary human heart, when every morning we awake and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what sort of immortals we wish to be."

Ken Burns has done a masterful job in chronicling World War II, and yet it is limited by its very purpose and scope: reporting on what happened, and not why it happens, or any other war happens. I think this is why we so desperately need Lewis's words in our own day, because we need to know that the challenges we face each day begin in the human heart as we decide, as Norris suggests, what kind of immortals we wish to be.

For FinishingWell,

Barry 

For the only surviving audio footage of Lewis's broadcast talks over the BBC ("The New Men," the last episode of Beyond Personality, broadcast 21 March, 1944), go to the following link: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/people/cslewis_16.shtml