I seldom give much consideration to the title of non-fiction books other than from the perspective of whether it is a book which might be worthy of my time and (perhaps more importantly) of my limited dollars. However, as I read the first couple of essays on the thought of C.S. Lewis in this book by well-known evangelicals, I was struck by the thought that the book was misnamed. The book should be called, “Why we think it is ok for evangelicals to like Lewis.†They go so far as to call Lewis “the patron saint of evangelicals†which is a bit of an unusual moniker for someone whose view of Scripture included such ideas as the Bible contains mythology, the generation of mankind was though the process of evolution and whose eschatology borders on a kind of universalism. Couple that with Lewis’s smoking and drinking, and it seems like an odd fit, though to be fair, the smoking and drinking are not as much of an issue as when I was growing up. So this volume is in some ways, an apologetic for the great apologist, or perhaps it would be better to say that it is an attempt to develop a hermeneutic which can be used to read Lewis though evangelical eyes. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis
