At the end of his life, C.S. Lewis was more Catholic pagan than anything else, and yet today he’s a lot of people’s idea of a ‘great Christian thinker’.

A reader’s poll in Christianity Today magazine rated Lewis “the most influential evangelical writer.” He is commonly identified by all media as “the 20^th century’s greatest Christian apologist.”

In a CT cover story appearing in December 2005, entitled “C.S. Lewis Superstar,” the magazine acknowledges, “Though (Lewis) shared basic Christian beliefs with evangelicals, he didn’t subscribe to biblical inerrancy or penal substitution. He believed in purgatory and baptismal regeneration.”

Lewis himself, in his classic 1952 book, Mere Christianity, says, “There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names—Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord’s supper.”

Obviously, “the Mass” he refers to is Catholic Mass, something dramatically different from Protestants simply passing around silver plates of Wonder Bread cubes and glass thimbles of Welch’s grape juice once a month after the Sunday morning sermon, in honor of the Lord’s Supper.

The bottom line, though, is all this stuff is Catholic-oriented ceremony, or man-made religious traditions that have nothing to do with the Bible.

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Look at this great passage from my pastor, Richard Jordan, explaining all this:

“In Luke 22, it says Jesus Christ ‘took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.’

“When you ‘brake bread’ in scripture, you’re eating. You’re sharing a meal together. Breaking bread is sharing a meal together in the scripture.

“In Luke, they were not going through some little ceremony like we generally do. In a Protestant church, usually it’s after a morning service, and you have the little ceremony where the guys come down front and you pass out the little crackers and the little jigger of grape juice.

“If it’s a small enough group, you’ll sit around—I was in group one time of 30 people in a circle and they took a bread loaf and broke it up and everybody got a piece of bread, then they took a little chalice of grape juice, and I’m looking at that, thinking, ‘I’m not sure how this is going to work.’

“Someone would take a little sip, wipe it off with a napkin, and turn it. Well, the problem is, sooner or later, you’ve turned it all the way around. And, you know, I’m not really good on backwash and drinking somebody else’s backwash, so when it came to me I passed it on. People wondered why and I just told them, ‘I’m not so much for drinking after other people.’

“Where that comes from in the Protestant church is it’s a Protestant version of the Catholic Mass where you have the piece of bread held up and given out, and then you have the chalice. It used to be that only the priest got to drink the hooch. Now, they let everybody have some of it, but you don’t get enough to do any good.

“The fact is, in the communion Paul’s talking about (in I Cor. 11:24) is not some little ceremony that let’s you be real religious.”

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Jordan continues, “I was reading in Judges 6 recently about Gideon. When the Lord comes to Gideon, Gideon is scared to death. The Midianites had taken over. He’s got a little wheat, so he’s out threshing it, but he’s got to hide by the winepress so the Midianites don’t come and steal it from him.

“I give him credit that he’s determined to get the wheat threshed even though he’s got to hide what he’s doing. And the angel of the Lord shows up and says something real strange—he calls him a ‘mighty man of valor.’

“Man, if there’s anybody who wasn’t valorous it was old Gideon—he’s scared to death! But as soon as the Lord says, ‘I’m going to use you to go deliver Israel,’ first thing Gideon does is get religious.

“It’s the weirdest thing you ever saw—‘Oh, ooh, I better go. Wait right here, Lord, don’t leave, don’t move, I’ve gotta a present for you!’ When the Lord tells you He’s going to do some things with you. . . when He called him ‘a mighty man of valor’ it wasn’t because Gideon was valorous, it’s because that’s what God saw in Gideon; something He’s going to make of him.

“Gideon says, ‘Wait right here, Lord, don’t move,’ and I think, ‘What is this guy doing…he’s nuttier than a hatter!’ And all down through that passage. . . J.C. O’Hair calls it the ‘vocabulary of unbelief’ coming out of that guy’s mouth.

“Imagine telling God to, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got something to do before you say any more’! It’s like Oral Roberts talking about how God said something to him one time and Oral answered, ‘Wait a minute, Lord!’ and he wanted to start arguing with God.

“I think, “Man, what kind of a nut are you?! You must think God’s your wife or something! You don’t argue with God!’ And these are ‘BIG men of God’?!

“Gideon went and got religious and you see, that’s what people do. They think, ‘Well, if we’re going to go serve God, we got to go get religious.’ ”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued. . . )