Step into the Light, Part 2: The Necessity of Surrender
By Annie Crawford
This article is the second in a three-part series called “Step into the Light” in which Annie Crawford explains how “an indispensable tool of thought” to Lewis’s work enables his readers to see Christianity not only as true, but deeply transformative. Click the titles below read other articles in this series:
Step into the Light, Part 1: Contemplation and Enjoyment in the Work of C.S. Lewis
Step into the Light, Part 2: The Necessity of Surrender
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As an apologist for the Christian faith, C.S. Lewis was keenly aware that he must not only communicate the reasonableness of Christianity as a satisfying object of thought but also portray it as a reality to be lived. Lewis therefore modeled an integrated approach to apologetics, employing both a rigorous use of reason and creative appeals to the imagination. Through rational argument, metaphor, and story, Lewis’s work invites others to “look at” the truth of Christian doctrine, as well as “look along” the beam of Christianity to see the world from inside the light of its truth. (See Part 1 of this series where I explain Lewis’s distinction between these two modes of understanding.)
Lewis’s integrated approach to apologetics demonstrates how, like the discovery of a lost chapter from a book, looking along the story of Christ “begins to illuminate the whole of the rest of the manuscript.”1 As the beam of light in the toolshed allowed Lewis to look beyond the structure and clearly see the rustling tree branches outside, an effective apologetic enables the unbeliever to see how the light of Christian truth illuminates the rest of reality and enables the world outside to make more sense.
However, through his own hard-fought conversion experience, Lewis also understood that an inhabited knowledge of God ultimately requires a total union, a relinquishment of control, and a final commitment that is not easily won. A saving knowledge of Christ is a participatory, personal knowledge. In Matthew 7, Jesus warned that “many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you.’”2 On Judgement Day, Christ told us that many will have known about Him and, in Contemplating Him, believed they were saved, but He will reject them on that day. Their knowledge was not personal and inhabited; they knew about the beam of his light but did not abide in it.
To intellectually agree with abstract propositions regarding the ontological truth of God’s existence is not to know Him as Lord, Bridegroom, and Savior. Contemplation of Christ is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Even the demons know He exists and shudder.3 Lewis frankly concedes, “It is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion… and the like, without having been inside any of them.”4 Faith in Christ is not to be found in agreement with an illuminating worldview but, as the Apostle Paul describes, to “be found in Him.”5
While Contemplation maintains a separation between the knower and the known, Enjoyment brings union. Once we Enjoy hope, we have allowed the beam of hope to become a part of us. While Contemplating an object, I am outside of it and separate from it. When I Enjoy something, it becomes not the object of my action but part of who I am. While Enjoying hope, it is part of me, and I am part of hope.
We long for this union. We long to be fully welcomed into the heart of all things.6 A saving knowledge of Christ makes us one with Him even as—unutterable wonder—the Father and the Son are One. In the high priestly prayer of John 17, Jesus prayed “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me.”7 This is an Enjoyment for which the Apostle Paul is willing to “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”8
The nature of Contemplation and Enjoyment further reveals that this union with Christ requires a surrender. Contemplation and Enjoyment differ in the amount of control we can exercise over our knowledge. All day long, we consciously choose to Contemplate various objects. We Contemplate these things from the outside, remaining separate from them and largely in control of our interaction with them.
However, Enjoyment is a very different kind of knowledge. While Enjoying something, we are certainly aware of it, yet we are not much in control of our Enjoyment. We have stepped inside the beam and cannot differentiate it clearly from ourselves. The moment we differentiate “I” from the “Enjoying,” we have stepped outside of it and made it an object again. Lewis observes that “the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment.”9 While hoping, I have given hope control over me. Once I wrest control back, I have ceased hoping.
It is right and good to Contemplate Christ, but at some point, Contemplation must be surrendered to Enjoyment. When we have stepped into the beam of faith and been baptized into Christ, we surrender ultimate control of our lives. To be in the beam of Christ—to live in Him and to see the world through Him—is to grant Christ control of our being and the way we see the world. I must die to my own apprehension so I might be reborn into a new understanding. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes how, in the final moments before his conversion to theism, he resisted surrendering this element of control: “I had always wanted, above all things, not to be ‘interfered with.’ I had wanted (mad wish) ‘to call my soul my own’… But now what had been an ideal became a command; and what might not be expected of one?”10 To Enjoy music is to grant the symphony no insignificant measure of control over our soul; to Enjoy God, the omnipotent, omniscient Other, is to surrender control utterly.
It is right and good to Contemplate Christ, but at some point, Contemplation must be surrendered to Enjoyment… To be in the beam of Christ—to live in Him and to see the world through Him—is to grant Christ control of our being and the way we see the world. I must die to my own apprehension so I might be reborn into a new understanding.
For this reason, we must also call one another to decision. Enjoyment of Christ requires a step of commitment, a moment that initiates participation. If I am to Enjoy Bach’s G major cello suite, at some moment I must actually pick up my bow and play. This moment of decision may take an infinite variety of forms, but it must come. The certainty of this moment is guaranteed by the inexorable reality of death. We have not been granted an infinite measure of time to equivocate and consider.
Lewis pressed this point in several of his works. In The Pilgrims’ Regress, the pilgrim John has seen the truth of God in the light of Reason but still flees faith like a hunted prey resisting capture. On the dark cliffs of decision, he sees the “aged, appalling face” of Death, “crumbling and chaotic.”11 Death commands John, “Do not think that you can escape me… surrender, not because any terms are offered, but because resistance is gone.”12 John must jump into the arms of The Dying God or be thrown into death alone.
The Great Divorce itself is an extended glimpse into this moment of existential decision. One of the blessed ghosts explains that “This moment contains all moments.”13 Either in the twilight of Hell or the dawn of Heaven, all the souls stand on the edge of sunset or sunrise when the blazing, unveiled glory of Christ will forever seal the destinies of all. The book ends when “ten thousand tongues of men and woodland angels and the wood itself sang. ‘It comes, it comes!’ they sang. ‘Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.’”14
Only after this committed surrender to union can we then “look along” the beam of Christ and be found truly in Him. Like marriage, a relationship with Christ can only be known from the inside after you have committed to Him and stepped into the light of His presence. As many discover with marriage, we cannot know what we have bound ourselves to until we are already in it and bound. You cannot “try out” being married; so long as your relationship is provisional, it is not the covenantal sacrament of marriage. This is why adultery and divorce are considered such grave sins in Christianity. The breaking of the marriage covenant destroys its function as the sacramental sign of the new covenant relationship with our Lord. To be in Christ is to be a new creation, joined with Him forever.
In the end, the Christian apologist must help others move from Contemplation to Enjoyment, from an acceptance of truth to a participation in it. C.S. Lewis’s insights challenge us to step beyond the safe distance of observation and into the radical intimacy of participation with Christ. To know Christ truly is to surrender, enter fully into the beam of his light, and allow that light to reshape every aspect of our being. This journey requires courage, humility, and, ultimately, a willingness to relinquish control to the One who alone gives life its true meaning. As Lewis himself discovered, the fullness of joy is found not in holding back, but in yielding wholly to the One who calls us into eternal communion with Him.
— Annie Crawford is a cultural apologist and classical educator with a Master of Arts in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University. She teaches apologetics and Great Text courses for Vine Classical Community in Austin, Texas, and is co-founder of The Society for Women of Letters where she serves as Senior Fellow. Annie also writes for The Symbolic World, Salvo, Classical Academic Press, and An Unexpected Journal, where she is a founding editor and writer. Learn more at anniecrawford.net.
C.S. Lewis, “The Grand Miracle,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 83.
Matthew 7:22-23 (ESV).
James 2:19.
C.S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock, 232.
Philippians 3:9.
C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 41.
John 17:23.
Philippians 3:8.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, in The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational Press, 1994), 120.
Ibid., 125.
C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B Eerdmans Publishing, 1992), 164.
Ibid.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York, HarperCollins, 2009), 109, Kindle.
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 145.