THE MOST RELUCTANT CONVERT: The Untold Story of CS Lewis

A Review

“You ask me my religious view: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion,” he wrote. “There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best.”

Who is this person writing? CS Lewis! The famous Christian apologist. Many have tagged him as one of the greatest apologists of the 20th Century. This was Lewis writing in his youth. How did this same man turn around to become one of the most important Christian thinkers of his age? That's the story of this movie, "The Most Reluctant Convert".

If CS Lewis was just a great writer, he will still be greatly loved.

But the man was more than that. He was a simple man who understood complicated things and explained them in the most simple ways for the most simple people. In one of his writings, he insists that is writing for the "mere" man.

CS Lewis was a clear thinker and a thinker who remembers the progression of his thoughts. Lewis remembers when he abandoned God. He remembered when he began to consider the question of God seriously, he remembered when he came to the conclusion that God exists, and he remembered when he came to the conclusion that he was a Christian. This is unique in many ways, and it provides us with a powerful tool to view the man and it adds to our understanding of "belief".

You can't accuse Lewis of not thinking, or just believing for no reason. He was a man who dealt with evidence only. In his atheistic days, he was bashful about religion. He mocked it, laughed at it, and criticized it harshly. He said he learned this from Mr. Kirk, who understood that everything must have evidence before it can be taken seriously.

Saying that "this is nonsense" does not make this nonsense, you have to show that this is nonsense.

To his credit, he also reanalyzed his atheistic foundations. The conclusions he came to will profoundly change him and the millions of people who will read his works.

As he said, "A truly honest atheist cannot be too careful of his reading".

If you don't believe in anything, then there should be no limit to whatever you do or read! That's exactly what he did.

This is a sound slap to the modern atheist who is proud in saying they will not read any religious book no matter the level of recommendations it comes with. Lewis read without limit. That's what put him in trouble.

One day, he read Phantastes by George MacDonald and it began the change in his head.

One of the great services Lewis did to himself and to us is that he considered the logical conclusions of atheism. For instance, in a part in this movie, he worries about the conclusion that "If my clearest reasoning tells me that my mind is nothing more than the accidental result of atoms colliding in my skulls, there must be some mistake. How should I trust my mind when it tells me that my most profoundest thoughts are merely mental patterns resulting from heredity and physics?". Don't rush this.

Slow down here. Think about it.

Another theme that shows this is when he reflected upon the "wrongness" of this world. When we say that something is wrong with this world, we are expressing that there is another world that ought to be right, we are invoking an absolute statement that there is how the world should be like, but it is gibberish to claim that from the rooftops of atheism! You cannot say that something is wrong within a framework that believes nothing should exist.

We don't talk about it often, but CS Lewis's atheism became a powerful blessing that he used to become an apologist. By any measure, he did excellent work.

Lewis's arguments about Jesus Christ are another delight of mine. He got this from Tolkien and one of his colleagues who expressed that "The evidence for the historicity of the gospels is surprisingly good. Rum thing, all that mythology about the dying god. Rum thing looks as if it really happened once."

I remember reading Lee Strobel's "The Case For Christ", and "Letters From A Skeptic", it changed my thinking completely. One needs to be intentionally dishonest to ignore the HISTORICAL EXISTENCE OF JESUS. The philosopher, Bart Erhman, makes a poignant point about this. "Despite the enormous range of opinion, there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. THE IDEA THAT JESUS DID NOT EXIST IS A MODERN NOTION. IT HAS NO ANCIENT PRECEDENTS. IT WAS MADE UP IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. ONE MIGHT AS WELL CALL IT A MODERN MYTH, THE MYTH OF THE MYTHICAL JESUS. "

By the way, Bart Ehrman is agnostic! An easy exercise is to compare the biblical evidence for Jesus and nonbiblical evidence, then compare it with any other figure of antiquity. No other figure of antiquity has more literature talking about him as a person like Jesus. For Lewis, it doesn't end here. What is the meaning of this? Why Jesus? Even if Jesus came, and claims to be God, why should it be important? It is common to hear skeptics say that they don't care about it. Lewis insists that the question of God is not like the question of a vote, you can't be indifferent. There is no any question more important than this. No any other. You have to think about this seriously, at least, once.

This is a fine movie about this man. It will help you understand Lewis in a new way. The narrative format deployed was excellent. I deeply enjoyed it. I should watch it at least once every other year from today.

I highly recommend.