Dr Paul Allen

C.S. Lewis was a twentieth-century novelist, Christian apologist , and lay theologian. Today marks the 50th anniversary of his death. You can find more resources on C.S. Lewis here . November 22, 1963, the date of President Kennedy's assassination , was also the day C.S. Lewis died. Seven years earlier he had thus described death: "The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." The metaphor inherent in these words is striking. It comes from the world of students and pupils, but only a teacher would employ it as a metaphor for death. The words (from The Last Battle) bring down the curtain — or perhaps better, close the wardrobe door — on Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. But they also open a window into who C.S. Lewis really was. The Student . Clive Staples Lewis ("Jack" to his friends) was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland , the second son of Albert Lewis , a promising attorney and his wife, Florence (&

Image via Wikipedia It has been called the Achilles ’ heel of  the Christian faith . Of course, I’m referring  to the classical problem of the existence of evil. Philosophers such as John Stuart Mill have argued that the existence of evil demonstrates that God is either not omnipotent or not good and loving — the reasoning being that if evil exists apart from the sovereign power of God, then by resistless logic, God cannot be deemed omnipotent.  On the other hand, if God does have the power to prevent evil but fails to do it, then this would reflect upon His character, indicating that He is neither good nor loving. Because of the persistence of this problem, the church has seen countless attempts at what is called theodicy . The term  theodicy  involves the combining of two Greek words: the word for God, theos , and the word for justification,  dikaios . Hence, a theodicy is an attempt to justify God for the existence of evil (as seen, for instance, in John Milton ’s  Paradise L