Faith That Stands Cross-Examination

In 1941, as Britain fought for survival in the Second World War, James Welch, the BBC's Director of Religious Broadcasting, sent a letter to an Oxford don at Magdalen College. Welch had just finished reading The Problem of Pain and sensed that its author, C.S. Lewis, could offer a war-weary nation something it desperately needed — not sentimental comfort, but solid ground for belief. Lewis agreed, and between 1941 and 1944, he delivered four series of radio talks to millions of listeners across the British Isles, making the rational case for Christianity with the precision of a scholar and the warmth of a friend.

Those broadcasts became the foundation of Mere Christianity, published in 1952 by Geoffrey Bles in London. What set Lewis apart was his insistence that faith was not a leap into darkness but a reasoned step into light. He argued from moral law, from human longing, from the very structure of reality — not to replace faith but to demonstrate that faith had substance beneath it.

Hebrews 11:1 declares that faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Notice the words the writer chose: substance and evidence. This is not the vocabulary of wishful thinking. It is the language of a courtroom, of a foundation being laid.

Lewis understood what every believer eventually discovers: genuine faith does not ask you to abandon your mind. It invites you to think more deeply — and then to trust the One your thinking leads you toward. The question is never whether there is enough evidence, but whether we have the courage to follow where it points.