a review of the Lewis wannabes

From David Skeel, a law professor who blogs at LessThanTheLeast-- here, in the WSJ on C.S. Lewis and those who follow in his apologetics footprints (hat tip: Linda Christiansen)...

Skeel concludes that none of them measure up to Mere Christianity, but the review is useful nonetheless.

Recently a friend assured me that a book by a well-known evangelical Christian was the new "Mere Christianity." For an evangelical this possibly cryptic statement needs no explanation. As evangelicals, we are called to evangelize -- to share the good news about Jesus Christ. Most of us also are surrounded by friends and co-workers who may be curious about our beliefs. And for over 55 years, Christians have turned to C.S. Lewis's little book "Mere Christianity" for both of these reasons.

Of course, C.S. Lewis was an Irish-born Anglican and was committed to a mode of worship and a tradition far removed from those of American evangelicals. But he was also an adept Christian apologist who used his literary gifts -- his fluent prose style, his powers of description, his engaging narrative voice, his way with metaphor -- to explain the basic tenets of Christianity: what it meant to believe in Jesus Christ and to live according to Christian principles. More than that: He was at pains to capture, in prose, what it meant to discover Christianity as something worthy of belief. On the page, he thought his own faith through, trying to make sense of it for himself and others. There is always something ecumenical and instructive to Lewis's religious writings, and "Mere Christianity" -- which has sold several million copies since it was first published in 1952 after its original incarnation as a series of radio broadcasts -- is the nonfiction book by which American Christians, not least American evangelicals, know Lewis best.

But much has changed in the last half-century. There is the constant hope that, even if it falls short of its prototype, a work of Christian apologetics will take its place alongside Lewis and help to explain Christianity to a new generation of readers, especially to skeptics....

The best of the contenders can be divided into two types. Some...[try] to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Christ was indeed the son of God who came to save us from our sins. For many years the leading example was "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" (1972) by Josh McDowell; the new superstar is Lee Strobel. The central theme for both authors is a trial, in which all the evidence will be weighed....

[In Case for Christ], Strobel...tracks down scholarly experts and quizzes them about whether Jesus was who he said he was....This clever tactic enables Mr. Strobel both to borrow the credibility of his experts and to translate their scholarly insights for a general audience. But the books are a little hokey....

...another set of books try to convey the beauty and joy of Christian worship. "Simply Christian" (2006) by Anglican Bishop and New Testament expert N.T. Wright fits this second category, as do earlier works like "Basic Christianity" (1986) by British evangelical heavyweight John Stott [another Anglican]...."Simply Christian" has transcendent passages. But he often digresses into theological debates (such as distinctions among "concrete" or literal or metaphorical interpretation of the Bible) that would mean little to readers who are new to the Christian faith.

As it turns out, Tim Keller's "The Reason for God" (2008), the book recommended by my friend, is the best of the "Mere Christianity" wannabes. Mr. Keller argues that the usual objections to Christianity -- that it is a straitjacket, that there cannot be just one true religion -- are themselves the product of a particular (secular Western) point of view. He then builds an affirmative case for Christianity, suggesting that the Big Bang and our appreciation of beauty are clues pointing to God and that Christ's resurrection was so unlikely both to Greeks and Romans (who viewed the material world as weak and corrupt) and to Jews (who expected any resurrection to come at the end of time) that it cannot be dismissed as the clever marketing strategy of a new religion....