Second, protest is usually unnecessary because anyone willing to do the research will find ample opportunities to do what Lewis does in his scholarly writings: discover legitimate academic imperative to say regarding catastrophic conversion and many other cardinal Christian doctrines and experiences, “to that experience I must now turn.” This turning can be done with virtually any discipline, but it cries out to be done with the humanities in general and literature and philosophy in particular. Not that the Christian teacher must conjure up some excuse to wedge in an excursus on Christianity and having done so, he and his students can all be relieved when it is finally over. To the contrary, thorough scholarship requires that we spend some time helping our students understand how Christianity has influenced the subjects under consideration. Because Christian teaching is fundamental to serious academics, it is a grievous error to omit it, and it would be a still more grievous error to omit it because we assume that students know about it.
Students are now almost entirely ignorant of even basic knowledge of the Bible, and students are not the only ones; many scholars, especially those born after 1950, demonstrate an alarming inability to even recognize, much less understand, basic Christian doctrines and biblical references. The situation becomes almost amusing when a scholar erroneously supposes he knows Christian doctrine and attempts to explain Milton, Herbert, Bunyan or some other writer whose work is saturated with Christianity. It would be unkind to mention specific instances of the silliness that sometimes flows from this ignorance, but scholars with limited understanding of Christianity will tend not only to miss the obvious but also to concoct the nonexistent. For example, these scholars, groping in the dark, assert that virtually every mention of wine is a reference to the Lord’s Supper; every mention of water is supposed to be a reference to baptism. Perhaps some of these scholars would be surprised to learn that Christians do occasionally use water for some purpose other than baptizing. Doubtless many of these scholars are somewhat embarrassed by their lack of biblical knowledge, but rectifying the situation would entail what many would never consider doing: actually reading the Bible.
In reality, while reading the Bible would help avoid some embarrassment, it would accomplish little more than that. C. S. Lewis’ expertise in matters Christian is not the result of a Bible survey course or merely reading the Bible through once or twice. (Though that is a noble start). His solid insights are the result of years of deliberate study, contemplation, and personal experience. By personal experience I mean that he himself was a believer. His being a believer made him a better scholar, especially when dealing with the literature written by professing believers. It is unrealistic to suppose that every person aspiring to be a scholar of English Literature ought to invest years of study in Christianity. With rare exception, the only English scholars who do that are professing believers. This being the case, it makes sense that every English department have at least one faculty member who is an earnest, church going, Bible-reading, regularly praying Christian. It would be a nightmare to advertise for someone having those qualifications, and I do not imagine that it is going to happen any time soon in America, but it makes good sense, and it is consistent with other hiring practices. Feminist studies are inevitably taught by a feminist. African American literature is virtually always taught by an African American. Why is it such a novel idea that the person best qualified to teach Herbert, Milton, Bunyan, and other conspicuously Christian writers is an academically and spiritually qualified Christian? In the increasingly prevalent context of Biblical and spiritual ignorance, how necessary is the gentle, informed, authoritative voice of a guide like C. S. Lewis who says, “To that experience I must now turn.”
[1] All parenthetical references are to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.