"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Dr. Harold Raley

About gay priests and bishops, I mean. Lewis (1898-1963) died before the controversy started in his church, but his reasoning on similar issues — abortion, women priests — gives us a good clue to the stand he would take in this latest donnybrook in Anglicanism and several other Christian denominations.

But who cares what a dead man thinks? Evidently millions of people, for Lewis remains, more than four decades after his death, one of the most popular Christian writers. In fact, he was arguably the most interesting British writer of the twentieth century. An atheist in his youth, Lewis converted to Anglican Christianity. But the title of his popular book, Mere Christianity, tells us his real attitude. With deep religiosity and without a smidgen of intolerance he insisted on the common core of Christianity. He was too wise to be pedantic and too responsible to be literarily cute, a vice that diminished many of his British contemporaries and no few American writers as well.

In 1948, long before women in the priesthood became an issue, Lewis wrote with considerable prescience on the subject in Time and Tide ("Priestesses in the Church?"). Lewis was persuaded that women were in no way inferior to men, that they could do nearly everything as well as men could, and better than men in many things. There is no question, he argued, that women can represent the believer before God; the difficulty comes from representing God to the believer. It is not that women are less saintly, intelligent, or caring. A good woman may be in the "likeness of God"; what was debatable for Lewis is whether God can be "like a good woman." For we say, "Our Father who art in Heaven," not "Our Mother." Of course, Lewis goes on to say, God is not biologically sexual as we understand it, but He has taught us to think of Him, to address Him, as Father. And the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate in the male, in the Son — not the Daughter — of God.

To change all this is to alter Christianity itself. True, men often make bad pastors and priests, just as they make bad husbands and fathers, but it does not help matters to try to switch roles. Men are charged with representing the Lord provisionally, that is, until the Parousia, or future return of Christ. Why this should be so remains one of those mysteries of Christianity that believers have no warrant to change merely because of human reasoning or cultural drifts.

So what would Lewis say about gay priests and bishops? Leaving aside scriptural references on the question and making the case purely on anthropological arguments, probably his dialectical reasoning would have a familiar ring. Homosexual men or women can be as caring and intelligent, perhaps as saintly as their "straight" counterparts, perhaps in as many instances as you wish, even more so. Certainly they can present our human concerns and petitions to the Father. But can they fully and adequately represent the Father to believers? Can the Father — should the Father — be represented by gay or lesbian persons? By today's cultural norms, the answer is a decided "yes"; by the criteria of Lewis's "mere Christianity," a definite "no."

Is it, then, a matter of majority rule? Can the matter be decided by a vote of ecclesiastical delegates? Most likely Lewis would remind us again that while democracy is valid for artificial creations such as political parties, it does not apply when we are dealing with persons in their total humanity, as Christianity does. When real persons and their ultimate fate are at stake it is not permissible to experiment and do as one pleases, not even what the majority pleases.

Finally, Lewis would probably wonder why those who would so tamper with the "mere Christianity" he wrote of so eloquently would claim to be Christian in the first place. To all those who label themselves Christian yet deny or disregard the Trinity, the Scriptures, the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, the Resurrection, or the ordained relationship of the human and the Divine, he would say they have a perfect right to believe or disbelieve. After all, no one forces them to profess Christianity. The atheist deserves the same civil respect as the most devout believer, and in fact often receives more. Today it is not necessary to pretend a Christian faith that one does not have. Why, then, do those who scorn biblical teachings still claim to be Christian when obviously their heart — and worse, their soul — is not in it?

Here, admittedly, we step beyond C.S. Lewis himself and connect the hypothetical dotted lines he indicated. And extending his reasoning, can we not perceive a will to destroy Christianity from within, and beyond that, eventually to eradicate the very dimension of religion — all religion — from human life? Is this radical secularism, itself an imitation religion, the ultimate aim of those who would sooner devastate the Church than yield on their extra-Christian agendas? By their fruits ye shall know them, admonish the Scriptures. It remains an infallible truth and a sure guide for sorting out what is happening in many branches of contemporary Christianity.

Dr. Harold Raley, former Dean of Fine Arts and Humanities at Houston Baptist University and presently Professor of Foreign Languages and Scholar-in-Residence; former Head of Foreign Languages at the University of Houston and Oklahoma State University. Author of seven books and over a hundred articles and studies on philosophy, language, and literature.