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To: Nosterrex
As an adult, I came at him not from the apologetics but from his professional work - the Oxford History volume, The Discarded Image, and the lectures that became A Preface to Paradise Lost. Those works are (of necessity) more Catholic in tone, even the last because he was looking more at the influences on Milton than Milton's own religious philosophy.

But how you can say he is on the Evangelical/Methodist continuum perplexes me. What Evangelical or Methodist did you ever meet that believed in either Purgatory or the Real Presence? My dear grandfather-in-law was a Methodist minister, and either of those doctrines would have curled his hair. And Lewis as an Evangelical is about as likely as Anthony Trollope as one. I would think the shadowy Presbyterianism of the Church of Ireland a far more likely influence on his Anglicanism (especially after reading The Pilgrim's Regress).

45 posted on 08/01/2009 7:59:17 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother (Ministrix of ye Chasse, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment))
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To: AnAmericanMother

First of all, I don’t believe that he actually believed in purgatory although he did mention it in one of his books. His last book was written with a totally pagan context, and yet I don’t believe that he was promoting paganism. I think that people read way too much in his fictional writings. I went to Fitzwilliam College at Cambridge and later to St.Chad college in Durham, which is a college for Anglican priests. There are many Anglicans, especially the Anglo-Catholics, that believe in transubstantiation and purgatory. I have also known Anglicans that were strict Calvinist and would not be caught dead in a cathedral. You have to understand that Anglicanism is so theologically broad that you can believe anything that you want. I know of an Anglican priest in Northumbria that is an atheist. Anglicans group themselves according to their liturgical practices: the low and lazy, broad and hazy, and high and crazy. The low church group reminds me of a typical Methodist worship service. From what his former students told me, he preferred worshiping in the chapel at Magdelene than the Cathedral. Magdelene was a sort of low church college. Lewis did find the cathedral at Durham inspiring, and it is. There is nothing like worshiping in a thousand year old Romanesque Cathedral. Sadly, only a handful of people are there on Sunday. I’m not even Anglican, and I never missed evensong or Sunday service.


46 posted on 08/01/2009 8:25:24 PM PDT by Nosterrex
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