by surprisedbyjoy » March 6th, 2005, 11:01 pm
Reading through this whole thread, I noticed one glaring omission in all the posts: Lewis always emphasized that he didn't know who would be saved. In any writing that approaches inclusivism, he is always very careful to state that only God knows who will be saved. He's always speaking in a speculative manner. He said that though certainly God CAN save people through other ways than baptism and Christianity, since Christianity is the only way we KNOW to be a way to salvation (I'm speaking to those who are Christians here) we shuld worry about bringing people to Christ and let God worry about other methods. I can't recall where Lewis wrote that, I'm sorry, that takes away my credibility, but I know he wrote it. And surely it's reasonable?
A helpful book for this discussion would be Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Wood. It talks about various folk religions and how traits in them poited toward Christ, often effecting dramatic conversions of large groups of people by small numbers of missionaries. When I read it I thought that it was exactly what C.S. Lewis would have predicted.