The New Gospel

Two explorers come upon a clearing in the jungle in which are growing many flowers and many weeds.  The first explorer asserts that the plot is cared for by a gardener, but the second disagrees.  To settle their dispute, they place the clearing under 24-hour surveillance.  But no gardener is ever seen.  The first explorer suggests that perhaps the gardener is invisible.  So they install an electric fence and patrol with bloodhounds.  Still no gardener is detected.  But the first explorer remains convinced that there is one—a gardener who is not only invisible, but also intangible, insensitive to electric shocks, has no scent, and makes no sound as he secretly cares for the garden he loves.  Finally, in exasperation, the second explorer asks, “But what remains of your original assertion?  Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, and eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?” 

It is no exaggeration to say that they [the Disciples] are among the most unpromising assortment of blunderers it was ever a sage’s misfortune to endure.  They are always saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, asking obtuse questions, jumping to absurd conclusions, missing the point, or otherwise putting their foot in their mouth.  

CS Lewis was a prose writer of the first rank and it is impossible to understand his enormous impact on his readers if you extricate his arguments from their contexts and formulate them analytically.  It is possible to do that, but in the process you divorce what he says from how he says it … [I intend] to show the extent to which the apparent cogency of his arguments depends on his rhetoric rather than on his logic.   To see that, we immerse ourselves in his rhetoric—his linguistic facility, his engaging terminology, his apt examples, his brilliant analogies, his stirring images, his persuasive metaphors, his recurring wit, his clever turns of phrase, his unexpected reversals of familiar truisms and so forth … The net result is a freshness, an honesty, and a sense of excitement unparalleled in contemporary apologetic literature.