“every man’s preacher, every woman’s exegete. Lewis, according to a speaker at a 1998 meeting at Wheaton College, is

Yet, over the past six decades, Mere Christianity has grown in popularity worldwide to the point that, since 2001, it has sold more than 3.5 million copies. Indeed, its publication, Marsden notes, was something of an afterthought.

Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’: A Biography, it is a book with humble beginnings as a series of short radio addresses that Lewis gave over the BBC to an embattled Britain, suffering under the blitz of German bombs and fearing invasion during World War II.Įach of three groups of talks was published as a small pamphlet, and, in 1952, Lewis collected and expanded these into a single volume. Instead, Lewis uses logic and imagination in an effort to entice people to consider the essential - i.e., “mere” - elements of the faith before choosing a particular creed.Īs historian George M. As such, the book avoids issues that separate the various denominations.

Mere Christianity is framed as an explanation of Christianity for those who aren’t believers or are nominal Christians. Lewis, a British university don and an expert in medieval and renaissance literature, is best known today as the writer of such novels as The Screwtape Letters and the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia, three of which have been made into movies in the last decade. In second place, though, was a book that had been written just 61 years earlier by a self-described amateur theologian named Clive Staples “Jack” Lewis with the unprepossessing title Mere Christianity.Ĭ.S. The winner in the final showdown was Confessions by Augustine, not a great surprise since it has been one of the foundational texts of Christianity for more than 1,700 years. Tolkien, John Calvin, Flannery O’Connor and Dante. The brackets, overseen by the Emerging Scholars Network of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an interdenominational evangelical campus ministry, featured 68 works by such spiritual heavyweights as Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Aquinas, Rick Warren, J.R.R. Three years ago, during the annual NCAA basketball March Madness, there was a parallel online tournament in which participants voted for the best Christian book of all time.

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