C. S. Lewis Quotes About Theology

• Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Knowing, People, Mind

• Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God--experiences compared with which many thrills of pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further you must use the map.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Confused, Real

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Boys, Thinking, Years

• Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Prayer, Miracle

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.70, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, 'Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.

  C. S. Lewis

  Miracle, Risk, Majority

• Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.

  C. S. Lewis

  Years, Supposing That, Temptation

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition”, p.9, Harper Collins

• I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Book, Heart

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.223, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• If you don't listen to theology, that won't mean you have no ideas about God, it will mean you have a lot of wrong ones.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mean, Ideas, Theology

• Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Religious, Art

• Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.

  C. S. Lewis

  Growth, Skepticism, Theology

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