In short, Lewis prepared himself to address the great questions of the day. The great questions of the day have always been the great questions. The Holy Spirit has guided others on the subject. Lewis discovered that he could draw upon the great cloud of witnesses who had to deal with the same questions in earlier times. He was not too proud to learn from them.

From Difficult to Plain

Perhaps Lewis’s greatest accomplishment as a communicator lay in his ability to take some of the most difficult philosophical and theological ideas of the last three thousand years and make them clearly understandable. I had a theology professor in seminary of whom the doctoral students used to say that he was the only man who could make a German theologian sound more obscure.

After doing the difficult work of preparation and study, Lewis then went further. He digested what he himself had learned and passed it on to his audience in a way that they could recognize and understand. Many preachers stay at the shallow level, always avoiding the dangers of boring the congregation with something too weighty. Some venture into the depths and drawn their congregations in technical language. Lewis went beyond the confusion of technical theological and philosophical discourse, and spoke to people in language they could understand. He once said of the problem of communication from the pulpit:

"What we want to see in every ordination exam is a compulsary paper on (simply) translation; a passage from some theological work to be turned into plain vernacular English. Just turned; not adorned, nor diluted, nor made ‘matey’. The exercise is very like doing Latin prose. Instead of saying, ‘How would Cicero have said that?’, you have to ask yourself, ‘How would my scout or bedmaker have said that?’"2

Lewis believed that if we cannot explain something to a sensible person without resorting to technical language, then we do not yet understand the thing itself.

Lewis picked up this theme in a rare moment of public stridency when he responded to Norman Pittinger who had attacked him in an article published in the Christian Century.3 After a careful response to Pittenger’s criticism of his theological writings, Lewis concluded his brief essay with a powerful broadside aimed at Pittenger and his ilk:

"When I began, Christianity came before the great mass of my unbelieving fellow-countrymen either in the highly emotional form offered by revivalists or in the unintelligible language of highly cultured clergymen. Most men were reached by neither. My task was therefore simply that of a translator — one turning Christian doctrine, or what he believed to be such, into the vernacular, into language that unscholarly people would attend to and understand . . . One thing at least is sure. If the real theologians had tackled this laborious work of translation about a hundred years ago, when they began to lose touch with the people (for whom Christ died), there would be no place for me."4