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R[oman] C[atholic]’s keep on writing to tell me (like you) that it is a pity that “knowing so much” I shd. be held back from knowing so much more!”
—C. S. Lewis 

We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true “Mormons.”
—Joseph Smith 

The apologetic works of Clive Staples (“Jack”) Lewis have transcended denominational boundaries to reach an impressively diverse Christian audience. From the beginning of his apologetic career in the mid-1930s, Lewis received letters from Catholics, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, and other Christians thanking him for his inspiring words. Fans from various Christian traditions who felt a certain kinship with Lewis often expressed regret or bewilderment about his allegiance to the Anglican Church. A desire to claim Lewis as a representative of one’s own beliefs still tempts many Christians. Richard Ostling, a former Time magazine religion editor, has mentioned the “extraordinary” interest in Lewis among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who seem to believe Lewis is “almost a crypto-Mormon.” According to Ostling, this phenomenon “shows the extraordinary acceptability and the usefulness of C. S. Lewis, because of course most of what he says is perfectly acceptable to Mormons.” 

My approach to Lewis and Latter-day Saints differs from previous approaches. Rather than selecting contextless proof-texts which resonate with Latter-day Saints, I will explore how Lewis’s experiences impacted his beliefs regarding conversion.Lewis’s personal transition from atheism to Christianity led him to understand conversion as a process of coming home to God by embracing good and rejecting evil. For Lewis and Latter-day Saints alike, beliefs from an array of religions or philosophical traditions can be seen as signposts pointing to higher truths on the road home. Thus, part of Lewis’s broad appeal results from an ecumenical view of other religions that is similar to (though looser than) that of many Latter-day Saints. 

This ecumenical view did not overshadow what Lewis saw as the fundamental necessity of faith in Jesus Christ, which raises the salient question: If Jesus Christ is the only name by which one can receive salvation, what is the fate of good people who have never heard, or had faith, in that name? Lewis held out hope for those not converted to Christianity during mortality, whom he referred to as “virtuous unbelievers” (2:256, 499). Moreover, because Lewis never came close to joining the LDS Church, he raises interesting questions for Latter-day Saints who believe one must accept “the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (D&C 20:9). To Latter-day Saints, Lewis is a believer—though a virtuous unbeliever in the “fulness of the gospel.” Often quoted by LDS authors, teachers, and General Authorities, Lewis is a representative recipient of God’s inspiration which Mormons believe can (and does) exist apart from official LDS channels. Further, he presents an interesting case study regarding the eternal status of non-LDS inspired voices. 

Theology loosely understood involves the way believers conceptualize and make sense of their experiences in the world, their experiences with God, and their expected future experiences. Understanding Lewis’s place within the LDS theology of salvation helps clarify the soteriological possibilities extended by Latter-day Saint theology to those who, like Lewis, end their lives outside of Mormonism. Non-Mormons may be surprised to learn that Latter-day Saints do not expect to be the only residents in heaven. Further, because LDS theological positions have not been uniform or static, Latter-day Saints themselves may be surprised at the extent of these possibilities for non-Mormons.

Much of my analysis is drawn from Lewis’s collected letters rather than from his other published works. I hope to include much fresh material that has remained untapped—material about the context of Lewis’s conversion and its influence on his unsystematic theology. From the first letter in which seven-year-old Lewis described the “adventure” of his pet canary Peter being chased by a cat (1:2–3) to the final letter more than fifty years later when sixty-four-year-old Lewis thanked a young boy for telling him how much he enjoyed his books (3:1483–84), Lewis’s letters trace his education, friendships, family life, inter-faith dialogue, and academic activities. He was a prolific correspondent; his letters fill three thick volumes and provide great insight into Lewis’s philosophical and theological thought. 

Occasionally, Lewis seems to turn around and catch you reading over his shoulder. For example, in earlier letters to lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, he said that their correspondence would make a “jolly interesting book” and a “great diversion” for future readers (1:173, 146). This prediction proved true, but it must have made Arthur nervous. Lewis later reassured him that anyone taking time to forage through their “tawdry nonsense” would be an “ill-bred cad” whose opinions they wouldn’t care about anyway (1:274). Lewis also recognized the potential for misquotation and proof-texting. Some critics of Lewis have used isolated quotes from various letters to claim he never gave up his “unholy fascination with pagan gods,” or that he hated children, or that he was something of a pervert.Careful evaluation of the letters is required because readers should not assume his letters, which were not written as a systematic whole, unequivocally give the clearest picture of Lewis’s thought.Lewis seems to warn later readers: “A heavy responsibility rests on those who forage through a dead man’s correspondence and publish it indiscriminately. In those books of [Sir Walter] Raleigh’s we find . . . letters like ‘a glass of good champagne’ side by side with mere squibs thrown off in high spirits or mere grumbles written when he was liverish.” 

I appreciate that heavy responsibility.First, I discuss a few aspects of Lewis’s journey to Christianity and argue that his personal experiences along that path contributed significantly to his sympathetic understanding of other religious traditions and philosophies. The next section documents Lewis’s views that conversion was a process, followed by the specific problem of the “virtuous unbeliever.” The article concludes with the paradoxical prob lem that Lewis, in Mormon terms, is himself a “virtuous unbeliever.” I explore the potential eternal status of inspired non-LDS post-Restoration voices. 

Journey to Christianity 

In retrospect, Lewis summarized his religious journey as going “from materialism to idealism . . . to pantheism . . . to theism to Christianity.”His early materialism contained a good deal of contempt for religion. “You ask me my religious views,” seventeen-year-old Lewis responded to Arthur Greeves on October 12, 1916. “You know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention. . . . Superstition of course in every age has held the common people, but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it, though usually outwardly conceding to it for convenience” (1:230–31). Almost fifteen years later on October 1, 1931, he confessed, also to Arthur: “How deep I am just now beginning to see: for I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity” (1:974). Lewis’s gradual conversion heavily influenced his later religious views, concerns, and apologetic method. 

Religious conversion is a complex and delicate issue.Susan Kwilecki has described conversion as development: a “gradual unfolding . . . something vague or indistinct becom[ing] definite or articulated.” This unfolding occurs in the “thought, emotion, [or] will—directed towards whatever the individual takes to be divine or ultimately significant.”Though I believe this description is accurate for Lewis’s own conversion, he would have disliked the ponderous vocabulary: “Any fool can write learned language,” he wrote. “The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it” (3:1,007; emphasis his). Because of his own conversion experience, Lewis was sympathetic to seeing conversion as a process rather than an event. Perhaps Lewis would have preferred this description from one of his favorite theologians, Scottish minister George MacDonald: “To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin [to work] far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us. . . . For our consciousness is to . . . our being . . . as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues: in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With his holy influence . . . he may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that he is answering our request.” 

This is the process Lewis described in his 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Life (3:645). In his letters Lewis referred to the book as “SBJ,” and one friend teased that he planned to write a companion volume for Lewis using the same initials; he’d call it “Suppressed By Jack” (3:750). Lewis tended to emphasize different aspects of his loss and rediscovery of faith, depending on the audience. Bits of what influenced his conversion are strewn like bread crumbs throughout the personal letters, allowing later birds to follow the trail in further detail. 

Lewis reports intellectually becoming an atheist around age fourteen when he saw how modern editors of Latin and Greek poets “always assumed that the ancient [pagan] religion was in pure error. Hence . . . came the obvious question ‘Why shouldn’t ours [Christianity] be equally false?’” (2:702). Lewis “pretended to believe for fear of my elders,” but this initial doubt grew to include problems with the efficacy of prayer and the problem of theodicy made acute by the death of his mother when he was nine years old. It was further cemented by a “‘Rationalist’ tutor,” W. T. (“the Great Knock”) Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis called the only “pure agnostic” he had ever met and whom he credited with teaching him “to think” (2:444, 702). Lewis’s youthful letters are often egotistic and antagonistic toward religion, though he was careful to maintain a facade of belief under certain circumstances.Contrast his formal letters to his father (then unaware of his atheism) with letters to Arthur, whom he often poked in the religious eye. He quoted the Bible regularly—to his father as consolation or as advice to “study the lilies of the field” (Matt. 6:28) but to Arthur in teasing about his “precious Jehovah,” the “old Hebrew thunder spirit” (1:82, 206). 

Despite such confidence, Lewis began doubting his empirical worldview as he felt a certain other-worldliness encroaching from behind. In 1916 Lewis eagerly wrote to tell Arthur about a “great literary experience.” He had picked up “by hazard” George MacDonald’s “Faerie Romance for Men and Women,” Phantastes, and urged: “You simply MUST get this at once” (1:169–70).He would later credit the book with doing him “much good” before his conversion, “when I had no idea what was behind it.” He recommended it to a friend: “This [book] has always made it easier for me to understand how the better elements in mythology can be a real praeparatio evangelica [preparation for the gospel] for people who do not yet know whither they are being led” (2:453). 

Soon after recommending Phantastes to Arthur, Lewis wrote to tell him of another “great find”: an “increasing tendency to wards philosophy,” which he had begun studying at Oxford. “All other questions really seem irrelevant till its [questions] are solved. I think you should take it up—its probings would at least save you from the intellectual stagnation that usually awaits a man who has found complete satisfaction in some traditional religious system.” He was impressed by alternate views of morality—for ex ample, that morals can be regarded “as a kind of art . . . to be pur sued for its own beauty” (1:341–43).His contempt for “religious systems” was tempered by a fellow student named Leo Baker. One late-night conversation in 1920 turned to “shadowy subjects— ghosts and spirits and Gods.” Baker described “seeing things” as a child, which led him to dabble in hypnotism and automatic writ ing. He’d given it up, but now “‘things’ were coming back of their own accord.” Lewis became “dazed and drunk in all he said.” Everything seemed “incredibly real.” The conversation left Lewis with a splitting headache. He felt “tired and nervous and pulled to pieces.” He concluded, “Perhaps [Baker] is a bit mad” (1:473). A few months later, Lewis wrote Baker to report an interesting development. Studying philosophy had led him to “postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory” accounting for the existence of matter. “But of course,” he hedged, “we know nothing.” Jettisoning his confident atheism, he said, “I have no business to object to the universe as long as I have nothing to offer myself—and in that respect we are all bankrupt” (1:509). 

Increasingly enamored with a spiritual side of life, though now agnostic on the question of God, Lewis continued discussing religion with Baker—at one point revisiting his former problems with petitionary prayer.He described the conversation to his brother Warren: “[I told Baker] the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.” He admitted that it was “of great moment” whether God was really there or not, “but what was the use of going on dispatching fervent messages—say to Edin burgh—if they all came back through the dead letter office. . . . His cryptic reply was that it would be almost worth going to Edinburgh to find out” (1:555). This possibility intrigued Lewis as he felt an ever-increasing “Something Else” mysteriously leaking into his life. Still, he doubted: “Whatever else the human race was made for, it at least was not made to know” (1:640). Early in 1923 when he was twenty-four, Lewis was living with Janie King Moore, the mother of a deceased friend. Moore’s brother, John Askins, a psychologist, came to visit. He had dabbled in spiritualism and, during his visit, experienced an “attack of war neurasthenia” which Lewis described to Arthur: “[Askins] endured awful tortures. . . . [H]e had horrible maniacal fits—had to be held down” by Lewis and Mrs. Moore for several nights in a row. He “had the delusion he was going to Hell.” Lewis advised Arthur to “keep clear of introspection, of brooding, of spiritual ism, of everything eccentric. Keep to work and sanity and open air—to the cheerful and matter of fact side of things. We hold our mental health by a thread” (1:605). In Surprised by Joy he cites this experience as one reason for “a retreat, almost a panic-stricken flight, from all that sort of romanticism which had hitherto been the chief concern of my life” (1:606 note 6). Shortly after this experience Lewis wrote his father to explain his related flight from the “solitude” of philosophy to English: 

I am glad of the change. I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life—is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity? There is a certain type of man, bull necked and self satisfied in his “pot bellied equanimity” who urgently needs that bleak and questioning atmosphere. But what is a tonic to the Saxon may be a debauch to us Celts. . . . I am not condemning philosophy. Indeed in turning from it to literary history and criticism, I am conscious of a descent: and if the air on the heights did not suit me, still I have brought back something of value. It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word: that Darwin and Spencer undermining ancestral beliefs stand themselves on a foundation of sand; of gigantic assumptions and irreconcilable contradictions an inch below the surface. It leaves the whole thing rich in possibilities: and if it dashes the shallow optimism it does the same for the shallow pessimisms. But having once seen all this “darkness”, a darkness full of promise, it is perhaps best to shut the trap door and come back to ordinary life: unless you are one of the really great who can see into it a little way—and I was not. (1:648–49) 

Lewis was “hideously shocked”in 1923 when two of his closest friends converted to Anthroposophy, a spiritualist-materialist system involving concepts of reincarnation and karma.Their conversion initiated what Lewis called “the Great War” (3:1,596– 1,645) between him and Owen Barfield.Their prolonged debate destroyed any remaining faith in what he called materialism, and years later he described the “kindly feeling” he had toward Anthroposophy for having “left the way open for Christianity” (3:198–99). Barfield had “failed to convert me to his own views . . . but his attack on my own presuppositions smashed the ordinary pseudo-‘scientific’ world-picture forever,” Lewis wrote (2:702–3). Looking back, Lewis attributed his appreciation and tolerance for non-Christian systems as being potential stepping stones to the ultimate truths of Christianity. He had developed strong reservations about the overriding (and in his view, overconfident) intellectual mood of his time.His distaste for spiritualism was tempered by his skepticism of empiricism. 

Always the bookworm, Lewis spent time with the plays of Euripides, Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity, G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man,and other works. Then in 1926, Lewis received another shock: “The hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was surprisingly good. ‘Rum thing,’ he went on. ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once.’” Lewis felt that, if this man was not “safe,” what could he say for his own mental defenses? 

By 1929 the leak of “Something Else” was becoming a flow. Lewis kicked off one of his many walking tours with friends by visiting Salisbury Cathedral where they attended evensong to hear the reading of psalms. He was very unimpressed by the “four fat and spongy clergymen [who] scampered and simpered through the job in a way that really disgusted me. It is perhaps too much to expect any intense spiritual quality in the reading of men who have to do it every day (and yet why are they in the church if the thing means so little to them as that?) . . . I know I should be ashamed to read out a recipe as abominably as they read out the psalms” (1:795). 

Lewis expected something more sincere and intimate in religious experience than he felt as he listened to this reading of the psalms. This concern for sincerity pervades his later apologetic approach and his understanding of the process of conversion. He had been feeling something—God creeping up behind him—but the feeling did not come and go merely as a verse of scripture was read or as he attended a religious service. Would these clergymen understand that feeling?Though the exact date is unknown, it was during Trinity Term (from the end of April to the middle of June) in 1929 that Lewis discovered that he finally believed in God: “You must picture me alone in that room …night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. . . . I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” 

“Terrible things are happening to me,” he wrote to Barfield in February 1930. “The ‘Spirit’ . . . is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery” (1:882–83). He wrote Arthur at the end of January 1930 to tell him about the “beauties of coming . . . to an attempt at religion,” which included the many books on God he now read with interest. “One finds oneself on the main road with all humanity, and can compare notes with an endless succession of previous travelers. It is emphatically coming home: as Chaucer says ‘Returneth home from worldly vanitee’” (1:872– 73). The changes kept coming; a few weeks later, he wrote to tell another friend that his outlook was now “definitely religious. It is not precisely Christianity, tho’ it may turn out that way in the end. . . . [W]hereas once I would have said ‘Shall I adopt Christianity’, I now wait to see whether it will adopt me” (1:887). 

It adopted him “one sunny morning” in September 1931 while riding to Bedfordshire’s Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of his brother’s motorbike: “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. . . . It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake” (1:972). 

Lewis began writing about his conversion. His first published fictional work on the subject was The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), a Bunyan-esque portrait of “John” traveling through a philosophical landscape before arriving at Christianity. Lewis used his own conversion to inform John’s travels; when one reader asked Lewis why the book seemed to end so abruptly, he replied: “The reason why John’s return journey is so simple in the book is that I hadn’t then begun traveling it and knew v. little about it—in fact ‘ignorance, Madam, sheer ignorance’” (2:492).His understanding of Christianity continued to grow. Soon he was pleased to experience yet another of his “delightful vernal periods when doctrines that have hitherto been only buried seeds begin actually to come up—like snowdrops or crocuses” (2:493; emphasis his). The doc trines, the beliefs, were coming to life in him. He often pointed out that as a new Christian he still had much to learn. For the rest of his life, he referred to himself as an “amateur theologian” and resisted systematizing his own thoughts.Still, he dug right in, looking for answers, encouraging other believers, writing apologetics, and making personal (and often frustrating) efforts to become more Christlike. The path he traveled into Christianity had a profound impact on the rest of his journey. 

Lewis’s outlook should strike a responsive chord with Latter-day Saints who are admonished to seek “anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy” (Thirteenth Article of Faith), even in other religions. Lewis’s experience-based understanding of religious conversion resonates strongly with Mormon views of the process. 

Conversion as a Process 

Shortly after his conversion, Lewis remained reluctant to lay out any one specific path for discovering God given his own roundabout way. He believed God was very involved in the process, though He would not compel one to believe in Him through proof.When author Sheldon Vanauken wrote Lewis about his own feeling of reluctant attraction to religion, Lewis teased: “I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!” (3:75–76)Lewis was “chary” of defining the steps of religious conversion too narrowly because the individual is not the only one involved in the process; God plays a fundamental role in drawing people to Him without coercion. Thus, mapping out an “indispensable norm (or syllabus!) for all Christians” would be a mistake. “I think the ways in which God saves us are probably infinitely various,” he wrote. “Anything which sets [the patient] saying ‘Now . . . Stage II ought to be coming along . . . is this it?’ I think bad and likely to lead some to presumption and others to despair. We must leave God to dress the wound and not keep on taking peeps under the bandage for ourselves” (2:914). 

Was one saved by God’s grace alone without any personal effort? Understanding that some Christians believe Paul made that argument, Lewis warned one questioner against “us[ing] an Apostle’s teaching to contradict that of Our Lord’s,” which urged believers to do good works. Nevertheless, any Christian, Lewis said, “looking back on his own conversion must feel—and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true—‘It is not I who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, wh. I have done nothing to earn.’” Lewis’s conversion was not a progressive struggle of his own efforts to achieve certainty about Christianity, but the grace of God filling his heart with surprising joy. It might feel natural to understand that feeling as a universal rule that all people should expect such an experience, but that is “exactly what we must not do,” Lewis continued. He could not find a completely convincing formula regarding “the inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom,” believing such a formula is beyond human reason. But Lewis added that we can be “quite sure that every kind act . . . will be accepted by Christ. Yet, equally, we all do feel sure that all the good in us comes from Grace. We have to leave it at that” (3:354–55). 

Reflecting on his own conversion, Lewis concluded that any number of beliefs could be a door in, or a door out—a path toward, or away from the truth. In 1934 Paul Elmer More published The Sceptical Approach to Religionas an effort to reconcile faith and reason. Lewis was impressed by the book and wrote to congratulate More but also to raise a question countering More’s disapproval for Idealism.More would understand Lewis’s lenience for idealism, Lewis insisted, had More traveled the same route as Lewis “from materialism to idealism . . . to pantheism . . . to theism to Christianity.” It was natural they should see things differently: 

A field which seems a high place to one ascending the mountain, seems almost part of the valley to one descending.Idealism is suspect to you as a door out of Christianity: for me it was the door in. Clearly a door, ex vi termini [by the force of the term] has this double aspect. I do not think I should be disrespectful in urging to you remember the “door in” aspect—to remember that in shutting the door to keep the faithful in, as you do so very firmly, you are inevitably, by the same act, shutting out those who might return. (2:145) 

Lewis said such tolerance resulted from “mere experience.” The door into Christianity would “always be dear” to him, though he thanked More for reminding him of the “door out” aspect which he had been overlooking (2:145–46).Lewis uses similar metaphors to make the same point. For example, while critiquing Sartre, Buber, and Tillich, Lewis noted that “the road into the city [of God] and the road out of it are usually the same road: it all depends which direction one travels in!” (3:1,238) Why disparage the path when there were valuable lessons to be learned by the way? Lewis expressed this point to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, who had experienced a similar journey from doubt to faith, although Griffiths wound up as a Catholic priest. He had corresponded with Lewis throughout their respective journeys.“And the result of the arrival is certainly not any ingratitude or contempt to the various signposts or hostelries that helped on the journey” (2:133). Lewis, like More and Griffiths, had found truth in surprising places and retained gratitude for their guiding signposts long after his conversion to Christianity. 

Looking for truth wherever it can be found has been emphasized as a religious duty for Latter-day Saints who view themselves as taking part in a “restitution of all things” (Acts 3:21). However, Joseph Smith’s 1820 visitation from God and Christ included the troubling declaration that Christ told him to join none of the exist ing churches because their creeds were “an abomination” and their professors “corrupt” (JS—History 1:19).Condemnation of an apostate Christendom is found in each of Joseph’s eight accounts of his vision. In the 1832 (earliest) version, the Lord tells Joseph that “the world lieth in sin and at this time and none doeth good no not one they have turned asside from the gospel and keep not <my> commandments[.]”This declaration, however, was preceded by a personal moment described in only two of Joseph’s known accounts. The first words Joseph said he heard from the Lord were “Joseph <my son> thy sins are forgiven thee. go thy <way> walk in my statutes and keep my commandments behold I am the Lord of glory I was crucifyed for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life.”This detail from the earliest account of the First Vision tempers descriptions of apostasy in the later accounts.Joseph’s words about “abominable creeds” and “corrupt professors” should be considered in the light of these and other moderating statements. Church President Gordon B. Hinckley’s in vitation for all non-Mormons to “bring all the good that you have and let us see if we can add to it” was not a recent development.It was Joseph Smith who said, “We don’t ask people to throw away any good they have got; we only ask them to come and get more.” “Truth” and “goodness” appear in relation, and there are truths to be found in many traditions. 

LDS philosopher David Paulsen argues that, while God directs the ongoing restoration, He expects “concurrent human initiative—not only in seeking and receiving direct revelation from God, but also in seeking, recognizing, and appropriating ‘truths’ from others, wherever found.”Joseph’s First Vision helps demarcate the acceptable boundaries for Latter-day Saints with its emphasis on Christ’s mission to save the entire world rather than a few elect, the significance of authority, and the importance of sincerity in Christian behavior. A sincere and good person can be acceptable to God—even without authority or “orthodox” understanding—Joseph Smith and his First Vision serving as a case in point for Latter-day Saints. The vision came before the reception of priesthood authority and without a “true and living Church” yet on the earth (D&C 1:30). 

Many of the same soteriological puzzles arose for the newly converted Lewis as did for Joseph Smith. Consider Lewis’s answer to the question, “What happens to Jews who are still waiting for the Messiah?” (3:245 note 241). He responded, “I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god . . . is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow” (3:245; emphasis his).For such statements, Lewis has been labeled a “dangerous false teacher” by some Christians who believe that Lewis is much too ecumenical. But compare his words to Brigham Young’s statement: 

I do not believe for one moment that there has been a man or woman upon the face of the earth . . . who has not been enlightened, instructed, and taught by the revelations of Jesus Christ.

What! the ignorant heathen? 

Yes, every human being who has possessed a sane mind. . . . No matter what the traditions of their fathers were, those who were honest before the Lord, and acted uprightly, according to the best knowledge they had, will have an opportunity to go into the kingdom of God. 

This is not to say that Lewis or Latter-day Saints preach an “anything goes” religion; there are certain boundaries. Nevertheless, it is difficult to negotiate between being “true to the faith” and the possibility of refusing new truths because they run counter to tradition.Moreover, accepting truth from any source any time might create believers who never make a solid commitment. This was the difficulty Lewis saw with attempts to proselyte for Christianity in the East: “Your Hindus certainly sound delightful,” he wrote to a friend who was writing a book on Christian-Hindu dialogue: “But what do they deny? That’s always been my trouble with Indians—to find any proposition they wd. pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions?” (3:704).Both Lewis and Latter-day Saints have ultimate courts of appeal to help adjudicate what “truths” can be gathered in and what “exclusions” such truths involve. Lewis often fell back upon scripture, Christian tradition, the Early Church Fathers (see, e.g., 2:451), and the common ground between Christian denominations. “We are free to take out of Anthroposophy anything that suits us, provided it does not contradict the Nicene Creed,” he advised one questioner (3:199).Joseph Smith would have rejected that stopping point: “I cannot believe in any of the creeds of the different denominations, because they all have some things in them I cannot subscribe to, though all of them have some truth. I want to come up into the presence of God, and learn all things; but the creeds set up stakes [limits], and say, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further’; which I cannot subscribe to.”Joseph Smith lamented the rigidity of belief that Christian creeds posed: “I have tried for a number of years to get the minds of the Saints prepared to receive the things of God, but we frequently see some of them after suffering all they have for the work of God will fly to peaces like glass as soon as anything Comes that is Contrary to their traditions, they Cannot stand the fire at all.” 

Lewis understood this precarious position in his adroit description of the “double task of reconciling and converting”: “The activities are almost opposites, yet must go hand in hand. We have to hurl down false gods and also elicit the peculiar truth preserved in the worship of each” (3:1,300). 

Despite Joseph’s dislike of the creeds, he too had limits. He declared that he had received authority directly from God: “No one [else] shall be appointed to receive revelations and commandments” for the Church until God “appoint[s] another in his stead” (D&C 28:2, 7). Lewis would likely have seen such revelations as unnecessary additions to biblical and Christian traditions. Joseph also taught that the path to exaltation required ordinances such as baptism by proper authority (D&C 20:73). Lewis declared such specific requirements superfluous if not too exclusionary. In one letter he advised: “As far as I know any baptism given in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, whoever gives it, is valid. But any instructed parson will tell you for sure” (3:490). His equivocation on authority is interesting in indicating Lewis’s deference to some ordained ministers. Smith revealed new commandments adapted to contemporary circumstances, including the “Word of Wisdom,” which forbade coffee, tea, tobacco, and alcoholic drinks (D&C 89). Lewis, who enjoyed his pint of ale, “strongly object[ed] to the tyrannic [sic] and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes tee-totalism a condition of membership” (3:580). 

As these examples demonstrate, by appealing to different authorities, Latter-day Saints and Lewis have charted boundaries to prevent borderless relativism. While Latter-day Saints turn to priesthood, prophets, the scriptural canon, and personal revelation, Lewis turned to scripture, tradition, and Christian common ground.Aside from these differences, Lewis and Latter-day Saints advocate reliance upon the guidance of the Holy Ghost (3:1,540). Despite believing that God wants all people to receive the ultimate truths (for Lewis, “mere Christianity,” for Latter-day Saints, “the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” each with different requirements), both leave open the possibility that spiritual experiences and guidance from God occur within different faith traditions. The personal religious experiences of others do not necessarily invalidate one’s own.A correspondent named William P. Wylie wrote Lewis in 1958 with questions on how to reconcile his personal spiritual experiences with those of non-Christians. Lewis admitted that God could influence many outside of Christianity; such experiences are not always “mere fictions or delusions of individual charlatans or lunatics.” We are not under obligation, Lewis argued, to cast such things aside. They may represent: “(a.) Truths about the spiritual world omitted by Revelation because they are irrelevant to our redemption. (b.) Truths omitted because they are positively dangerous and noxious to us in our present condition. (c.) Real psychic facts of no particular importance (d.) Semi-rationalised—or philosophized—mythology (e.) Diabolical delusions. (f.) Straight quackery for catching flats” (3:928–29). 

The Fate of the Virtuous Unbeliever 

As Lewis saw it, God may utilize different belief systems to lead His children back to Him. But “even if there are a thousand orders of beneficent being [sic] above us, still, the universe is a cheat unless at the back of them all there is the one God of Christianity” (2:108). What did Lewis think about those who would not accept that one God? Moreover, what about Latter-day Saints who believe Lewis may have missed his own opportunity to accept the “fulness of the restored gospel”? Some Latter-day Saints might emphasize this selection from the Book of Mormon: 

For behold, this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors. 

. . . I beseech of you that ye do not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end; for after this day of life, which is given us to prepare for eternity, behold, if we do not improve our time while in this life, then cometh the night of darkness wherein there can be no labor performed. (Alma 34:32–33) 

Similarly, Lewis did not necessarily think unbelievers would have an eternal opportunity to turn to God. His 1940s radio broadcasts (later published as Mere Christianity) included a sense of urgency: “Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.”Lewis explained this point elsewhere: “I mean that each individual only has [the chance] for a short time i.e. is only alive on this Earth for a short time” (2:776). Some LDS leaders have spoken against the possibility of a “second chance” at salvation. Elder Bruce R. McConkie listed the idea among his “Seven Deadly Heresies.” After paraphrasing from Alma 34, he declared: “For those who do not have an opportunity in this life, the first chance to gain salvation will come in the spirit world. …Those who reject the gospel in this life and then receive it in the spirit world go not to the celestial, but to the terrestrial kingdom.”McConkie did not address how mortals are to know what actually constitutes an honest and true “chance” or who has actually received one. Church president Joseph Fielding Smith, McConkie’s father-in-law, expressed a similar view in interesting terms: “All who have not had the privilege of repentance and acceptance of the plan of salvation in this life will have that opportunity in the world of spirits. Those who repent there and believe when the message is declared to them are heirs of salvation and exaltation.” Still, he concluded: “It is the duty of all men who hear the gospel to repent. If they reject the gospel when it is declared to them here, then they are damned. The Savior has said it. If they receive and endure to the end, they shall receive the blessings. Every man has his agency.” 

Neither of these works is considered “official doctrine” of the LDS Church. Other LDS leaders have presented slightly more lenient views.Joseph Smith’s own understanding adapted over time as he received further revelation. The Book of Mormon’s “night of darkness” (Alma 34:33)was somewhat brightened in 1832 by Smith’s vision of the “three degrees of glory,” presenting a significant departure from a strict heaven/hell dichotomy with graded degrees of celestial, terrestrial, and telestial. This revelation appears to depict virtuous unbelievers as being incapable of reaching the highest (“celestial”) degree of glory. “Terrestrial” inhabitants “are they who died without law; Who received not the testimony of Jesus in the flesh, but afterwards received it. These are they who are honorable men of the earth, who were blinded by the craftiness of men. These are they who receive of his glory, but not of his fulness” (D&C 76:72–76). This revelation may have caused consternation for the Prophet, whose older brother Alvin died before being baptized.However, in 1836 “the heavens were opened” again to Joseph in the Kirtland Temple. There he “be held the celestial kingdom of God, and the glory thereof,” whose inhabitants included Adam and Eve, Abraham, Alvin, Joseph’s deceased father, and his still-living mother: 

[I] marveled how it was that [Alvin] had obtained an inheritance in that kingdom, seeing that he had departed this life before the Lord had set his hand to gather Israel the second time, and had not been baptized for the remission of sins. 

Thus came the voice of the Lord unto me, saying: All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God; 

Also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom; 

For I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts. (D&C 137:5–7; emphasis mine) 

This doctrine seems foreshadowed in the Book of Mormon’s “plan of restoration,” whereby people would be judged by “intent of heart” and the “law” under which they lived (Alma 41; Moro. 7:6–11). 

This doctrine was vividly described in one of Brigham Young’s discourses, which told of one well-meaning—though particularly impatient—missionary: 

I recollect . . . sending an Elder to Bristol, to open a door there, and see if anybody would believe. He had a little more than thirty miles to walk; he starts off one morning, and arrives at Bristol; he preached the Gospel to them, and sealed them all up to damnation, and was back next morning. He was just as good a man, too, as we had. It was want of knowledge caused him to do so. I go and preach to the people, and tell them at the end of every sermon, “he that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved; and he that believeth not, shall be damned.” I continue preaching there day after day . . . and yet nobody believes my testimony. . . . 

“What shall I do in this case, if I am sent to preach there?” you may inquire. You must continue to preach there . . . [I would] continue to plead with them, until they bend their dispositions to the Gospel. Why? 

Because I must be patient with them, as the Lord is patient with me; as the Lord is merciful to me, I will be merciful to others; as He continues to be merciful to me, consequently I must continue in long-suffering to be merciful to others—patiently waiting, with all diligence, until the people will believe, and until they are prepared to become heirs to a celestial kingdom, or angels to the devil. 

How can Young’s patient God be reconciled with scriptures describing the path to God’s kingdom as so “strait and narrow” that “few there be that find it”? (Matt. 7:14). This particular verse troubled Lewis enough that he brought it up during a weekly gathering of friends (the “Inklings”) to hash through its implications. It resulted in fireworks: “The occasion was a discussion of the most distressing text in the Bible (‘narrow is the way and few they be that find it’) and whether one really could believe in a universe where the majority were damned and also in the goodness of God. [Charles] Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to your ideas of goodness or not” (2:283; see also 2:450–51, 1,008). 

When Charles Williams disagreed, Wrenn was upset and “expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people” (2:283).However, Lewis concluded that “the general sense of the meeting was in favour of a view on the lines taken in Pastor Pastorum—that Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical.” A decade later the verse still escaped Lewis’s grasp. He wondered: “Dare we gloss the text ‘Strait is the way and few there be that find it’ by adding ‘And that’s why most of you have to be bustled and badgered into it like sheep—and the sheep-dogs have to have pretty sharp teeth too!’ I hope so” (2:1,008). 

Lewis believed that all who are saved will be “saved by Christ whether His grace comes to us by way of the Natural Law” or through Christianity (3:23).Aquinas saw natural law as “nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation.”Latter-day Saints have a similar concept in the “Light of Christ” which is “given to every man, that he may know good from evil” (Moro. 7:16; see also Alma 12:9–11).In order to separate the true from the false manifestations, proper living will increase one’s perception and possession of “light.” Truth is measured on a scale from darkness to light which can grow “brighter and brighter until the perfect day” (D&C 50:24; Prov. 4:18) through obedience, regardless of initial denomination or belief, and regardless of where various truths originated, or, as Lewis wrote to a recent Christian convert: “One can begin to try to be a disciple before one is a professed theologian. In fact they tell us, don’t they, that in these matters to act on the light one has is almost the only way to more light” (3:1,540). The key for conversion is not simply arriving at a correct understanding of the nature of God or agreeing on various other theological points. The key for what Lewis called the “virtuous unbeliever”is virtue. 

“Seriously,” Lewis wrote, “I don’t pretend to have any information on the fate of the virtuous unbeliever. I don’t suppose this question provided the solitary exception to the principle that actions on a false hypothesis lead to some less satisfactory result than actions on a true. That’s as far as I would go—beyond feeling that the believer is playing for higher stakes and incurring danger of something really nasty” (2:256).He had wondered what “Christ’s descending into Hell and preaching to the dead” indicated;and when directly asked if people could receive “another chance after death” to accept the gospel, he hedged by referring the questioner to the views of a friend (Charles Williams) on purgatory. “Of course,” he added, “our anxiety about unbelievers is most usefully employed when it leads us not to speculation but to earnest prayer for them and the attempt to be in our own lives such good advertisements for Christianity as will make it attractive” (3:245–46). Lewis did not believe the Bible was specific enough for him to take a definite stance on the issue: “I don’t think we know the details,” he wrote, “we must just stick to the view that (a.) All justice and mercy will be done, (b) But that nevertheless it is our duty to do all we can to convert unbelievers” (3:163). 

Borrowing from the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25), Lewis privileged orthopraxy over orthodoxy in his NARNIA series. At the end of The Last Battle, Emeth finds himself in the heavenly Narnia standing before Aslan. He feels out of place and ashamed, believing he had worshipped a false god, Tash, all his life: 

“The Glorious One,” [Emeth] said, “bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou has done to Tash, I account as service done to me. . . . Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou shouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.” 

Latter-day Saints similarly put more emphasis on what humans have become as a result of God’s grace, combined with the individual’s actions, more than what humans have intellectually assented to or believed in creedal declaration.Some Christians have labeled such beliefs “damnable heresies.”Others claim that such believers, including Latter-day Saints, merit eternal damnation because they disobey the first of Christ’s two great commandments by loving a “false” god. Claims by some counter cult movements that Latter-day Saints worship a “different Jesus” are constructed largely on ontological foundations; that is, on LDS rejection of post-biblical creeds regarding the nature of God.However, there can be little doubt about the devotional direction of the second of the two great commandments: “love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Bible seems to depict obedience to the second as necessarily reflecting back on the first, a concept depicted in the parable of the sheep and the goats: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).Loving one’s neighbor is like loving God. Lewis believed this parable “suggests that [virtuous unbelievers] have a very pleasant surprise coming to them.”The way a person fulfills these two great commandments plays an important part in God’s final judgment of human souls, be they Latter-day Saint, Anglican, Buddhist, agnostic, or otherwise. 

This ecumenical soteriology has carried through from Joseph Smith’s revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants to more recent LDS general conference addresses from members of the Quorum of the Twelve. Elder Dallin H. Oaks has urged Latter-day Saints to “never give up hope and loving associations with family members and friends whose fine qualities evidence their progress toward what a loving Father would have them become. . . . We should never give up on loved ones who now seem to be making many wrong choices.”Rather than “judging and condemning” others not of one’s own faith without mercy, as “one portion of the hu man race” does, Joseph Smith said “the Great Parent of the universe looks upon the whole of the human family with a fatherly care and paternal regard; He views them as His offspring, and without any of those contracted feelings that influence the children of men.”Citing Christ’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16), Oaks emphasized that all workers, those who worked all day, half the day, and part of the day, received the same wage. One lesson from this parable is “that the Master’s reward in the Final Judgment will not be based on how long we have labored in the vineyard,” which Oaks likened to belonging to and participating in the LDS Church: 

We do not obtain our heavenly reward by punching a time clock. What is essential is that our labors in the workplace of the Lord have caused us to become something. For some of us, this re quires a longer time than for others. What is important in the end is what we have become by our labors. Many who come in the eleventh hour have been refined and prepared by the Lord in ways other than formal employment in the vineyard. . . . [T]hese workers are in the same state of development and qualified to receive the same reward as those who have labored long in the vineyard. 

Again, as with Lewis, the emphasis is on orthopraxy. 

Lewis as a “Virtuous Unbeliever” 

From an LDS standpoint, Lewis himself is viewed as a virtuous unbeliever since he was not baptized by the authority of the LDS Church. At the same time, his labors in God’s vineyard of the world have been recognized and enjoyed by many Latter-day Saints who believe that inspired words can come from those of different faith traditions.Many Latter-day Saints would likely include Lewis in Oaks’s description of unbaptized workers who “are like the prepared dry mix to which it is only necessary to ‘add water’—the perfecting ordinance of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. With that addition—even in the eleventh hour—these workers are in the same state of development and qualified to receive the same reward as those who have labored long in the vineyard.” 

In the LDS view, exaltation is not out of reach for an individual like Lewis because the “eleventh hour” does not necessarily end at death.The “fulness of the gospel” is being preached to the dead in the spirit world (D&C 124:29–39) and required ordinances like baptism can be administered by living proxies (D&C 138) on behalf of the deceased.Latter-day Saints believe that individuals in the spirit world choose to accept or reject proxy ordinances performed on their behalf, thus preserving their agency.This doctrine mercifully expands possibilities for the virtuous unbeliever while keeping the Christian conditions ultimately the same.Latter-day Saints balance the necessity of Jesus Christ, the meaningful free will of humans, and the mercy and justice of God by recognizing that ultimately, in this life or after death, every person can choose to “become one” in Christ. 

As described in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, the actions and choices of virtuous unbelievers in their daily lives play a role in their ultimate destiny. God is teaching His children the lessons they need to learn even though they may not have heard specifically of Jesus Christ. For Latter-day Saints, as well as for Lewis, mortal life itself is structured to shape humans as God desires—providing opportunities to accept or reject the light. God is working with all of His children on their own levels and in various religious traditions to bring them back home. Christianity asserts that through God all men and women can be born again. 

In the eternal scheme of things as understood in Mormonism, justice and mercy work together to provide all with an opportunity to receive “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” to use Paul’s words (Eph. 4:13). Or as Latter-day Saints might say, to receive a “celestial glory” in the hereafter, without leaving the necessary ordinances behind. But the ordinances themselves are only one part of the process of conversion in Latter-day Saint thought, and they can come at the very tail end of the process if need be. For Lewis and Latter-day Saints, conversion is a process that is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. It is not merely instantaneous, it might not appear on the outside to follow the same set path for everyone, but it is real. “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again,” Christ explained. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:7–8).