Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 21:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: A Clue To The Clue: "The Abolition Of Man" As A Supplement To The Moral Argument Of "Mere Christianity"
Author: Donald T. Williams

A Clue To The Clue: The Abolition Of Man As A Supplement To The Moral Argument Of Mere Christianity

Donald T. Williams

Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College, an ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church of America, and a member of University Church, Athens, GA.

This paper was delivered as a plenary address at Defend 2024 at the kind invitation of Dr. Bob Stewart, whose visionary leadership at the Defend conference and at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary is greatly appreciated by this author. Further material on Lewis’s Moral Argument for Theism from Mere Christianity can be found in my book Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (Tampa: DeWard, 2023).

Introduction

One of C. S. Lewis’s most cogent and powerful arguments is that in his scintillating little book The Abolition of Man.1 The brilliance of the book is widely recognized. Lewis was invited to deliver the Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham University in February of 1943, and the book was the published version of those lectures. The lectures seem to have been so closely reasoned that they puzzled some members of the audience, the initial reception to their publication was muted, and “none of the few reviewers of the first edition seemed to realize its importance,” George Sayer reports. Nevertheless the book is now recognized as “the best existing defense of objective values and the natural law.”2 Travers thinks that “Lewis’s unflinching commitment to universal objective moral standards in the face of the subjectivist drift in modern culture is his great contribution to ethical thinking in the modern

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world.”3 The book has been called “perhaps the best defense of natural law to be published in the 20^th century,”4 “the most profound of Lewis’s cultural critiques,”5 and “an eloquent example of his ruthless reasoning powers at their most effective.”6

Due to the nature of the lecture series, Abolition is an apology, not for Christianity, but simply for the objectivity of value. That is a hugely important issue in the culture wars that surround us in its own right. But for our purposes as Christian Apologists, the importance of the book is as a supplement to Lewis’s Moral Argument for Theism in Mere Christianity.7 ...