Was C.S. Lewis a Crypto-Mormon

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Many LDS writers have been fascinated with C. S. Lewis to the point of making him an "honorary member" of the LDS Church. A recent article stated, "Lewis wrote about the nature of God and how man's ultimate potential is to become like deity, something that seems to resonate with LDS audiences." To LDS, this means that we can become gods like our God is a God for us. In his book, The Mormon Faith: A New Look at Christianity, BYU’s Robert Millet claims that Lewis taught this LDS deification doctrine (176). Nathan Jensen’s "The Restored Gospel According to C. S. Lewis" has the following as a book description: "C.S. Lewis had no substantial contact with members of the LDS Church, yet he has filled his writings with precepts and doctrines that are not only true, but are unique to the restored church."

However, in the Mormon journal Dialogue, Evan Stephenson was clear: "In C. S. Lewis, Latter-day Saints do not find a unique figure who mirrors their own theology" ("The Last Battle: C. S. Lewis and Mormonism," 30, no. 4 [Winter 1997]: 69). Since Mormons distort the central doctrines of the Christian Faith, it should come as no surprise that they also distort the work of Lewis.

"Lewis was aware of the Book of Mormon and assumed Joseph Smith wrote it" (Ostling, Mormon America, 308). It's also clear, in contrast to Mormonism, that Lewis was a monotheist. His doctrine of deification was consistent with the monotheistic doctrine found in Eastern Orthodoxy and the Church Fathers. Becoming gods is quite different from the only God who is God by nature. Thus, for Lewis, God is a totally different one of a kind species--Creator of literally everything outside Himself. He is not human by nature. If we become "gods," we are still dependent humans by nature. Finally, for Lewis, the Son is a one of a kind species--the only begotten God (i.e., God by nature). Lewis affirmed the creedal distinction between "Making and Begetting" (cf. Book IV chapter I of Mere Christianity). The Son was begotten, not made as we are. For more on Lewis’ view of deification, click here.

This is so much mormon bunk about faithful Lewis.

And CS Lewis would strongly disagree with the mormon doctrine of Exaltation. Standard mormon misrepresentation.

Not so fast. The “sleight of mind” performed by the Mormons comes nowhere close even to the “sleight of hand” of a Las Vegas lounge stage magician. C. S. Lewis is no crypto-Mormon. Not only do his works not support the Mormon theology of deification, in fact they expressly contradict it. Each of the Lewis citations have been taken out of their contexts and twisted. In addition, frequently in his writings about humanity’s eternal destiny, he carefully clarifies the eternal and impassible gulf between the only Creator and His creatures, including humans.

In the first quote, Lewis’s context comes in a chapter called “Counting the Cost,” and describes the process of sanctification that God begins at the moment one becomes a Christian and will continue until we are reunited after death and the judgment with our resurrected bodies, when we will be “perfect,” that is, “complete,” as creatures. In fact, the sentence immediately preceding the Mormons’ favorite is “He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command.”18 In the same small volume he explains,

What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.19

In The Weight of Glory Lewis explains what he means by the perfection that God will work in us as we are sanctified, resurrected, and glorified. He distinguishes between God, the only Creator, and humans, even glorified, the created. In the beginning of the essay he explains,

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promises, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly . . . that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple.20 Lewis’s positive assertions that we can never be deified in the Mormon sense come in a variety of forms. In his popular The Problem of Pain he notes,

For we are only creatures; our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire.21

Lewis notes the infinite chasm between Creator and creature when he describes, in the same book, the fall of humanity as “This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall.”22 Lewis concludes The Problem of Pain with the glorious comparison:

As our Earth is to all the stars, so doubtless are we men and our concerns to all creation; as all the stars are to space itself, so are all creatures, all thrones and powers and mightiest of the created gods, to the abyss of the self-existing Being, who is to us Father and Redeemer and indwelling Comforter, but of whom no man nor angel can say nor conceive what He is in and for Himself, or what is the work that he “maketh from the beginning to the end.” For they are all derived and unsubstantial things. Their vision fails them and they cover their eyes from the intolerable light of utter actuality, which was and is and shall be, which never could have been otherwise, which has no opposite.23

Perhaps nowhere is Lewis’s consciousness of the utter difference between God and those made in His image greater than in his compelling science fiction trilogy, the Space Trilogy, consisting of three books, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.24 Lewis draws the reader into a world of time and space travel, alternate worlds, evil and technological destruction and good and selfless sacrifice. It is the story of all stories, the redemption story that began in Eden and, for this series, ends in post-World War II England: God has created us for glory. We have abandoned Him in favor of our own evil desires. He has done everything to redeem us to Himself. Will we respond in faith believing, inheriting the glory prepared for us? Or will we respond with continued self-worship and absorption, damned by our own idolatry to worship ourselves, gods beneath our own dignity? The first way is God’s way. The second—whether cloaked in pantheism, polytheism, the henotheism of Mormon theology, or the masterful guise of materialistic humanism—is not.

Endnotes: 1. C. S. Lewis, Beyond Personality (London: The Centenary Press, 1945), 48. Also contained in Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Company, 1952), 174-175.
2. Lewis is misused by other individuals, religious movements, and organizations as well; and Mormons also attempt to defend their deification theology in other ways, such as comparing it to the nonheretical Eastern Orthodox theology of “theosis,” but the focus of this brief article is restricted to the Mormon use of Lewis’s writings for this purpose. For more information on these issues, see Richard and Joan Ostling’s Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999), especially pages 307-314; “Grace and the Divinization of Humanity” at http://mysticalrose.tripod.com/grace3.html; and Kurt Van Gorden’s “Can Man Progress to Godhood?” at www.answers.org/Theology/Man_become_God.html.
3. Ted Olsen, “C. S. Lewis,” Christian History, no. 65 (spring 2000) in “The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century.”
4. Lewis died November 23, 1963, the same date as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley.
5. Craig L. Blomberg and Stephen E. Robinson, How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997).
6. In an article contributed by Robinson to editor Daniel H. Ludlow’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan Press, 1992).
7. Conference brochure, n.p., n.d.
8. John W. Kennedy, “Southern Baptists Take Up the Mormon Challenge” Christianity Today, 15 June 1998, 30.
9. Jay Copp, “Readers Cross Religious Lines for C. S. Lewis,” Christian Science Monitor, 23 May 1999, 19.
10. See www.signaturebooksinc.com/stranger.htm.
11. Despite its goals and the credentials of its contributors, there is no way to historically, evidentially, biblically, philosophically, or scientifically verify the fiction of Mormon history and theology. This, however, is not the forum for a critique of FARMS.
12. See www/farmsresearch.com/ free/qanda/basicissuesch5.html.
13. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1949), 14-15.
14. For information see www.jersey.net/~inkwell/mormonet.htm.
15. Quoted from Richard and Joan Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1999), 308. 16. Ibid., 307.
17. Ibid., 307-308.
18. Lewis, Beyond Personality, 48.
19. Ibid., 12-13.
20. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 7.
21. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962), 51. 22. Ibid., 80. 23. Ibid., 153-154. 24. Available in various editions, including 1996 edition from Simon and Schuster.

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