If C.S. Lewis were alive today, would he write about male headship? In one sense, this question is akin to Kennedy enthusiasts arguing that JFK would have spared the nation from Viet Nam, or neo-Confederates arguing that President Davis’s successor would have abolished slavery in the CSA. But a brief suggestion in a new book asks that question, a question that reveals much about what we consider “mere Christianity” in the twenty-first century.
In anticipation of the December release of Disney’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a flurry of books on C.S. Lewis and the Narnia series are hitting the chain bookstore shelves. Among the best of these is Alan Jacobs’s The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis.
Jacobs, a professor of literature at Wheaton College and a brilliant essayist in his own right, makes a curious side-path discussion into Lewis’s views on male headship. Jacobs rightly notes that Lewis did not consider such an idea controversial among Christians, which is why he included in Mere Christianity, which lays out “the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.”
This much is true. Lewis did not believe male headship was a controversial idea among Christians, because it wasn’t…and hadn’t been for nearly 2000 years of church history. Moreover, Lewis didn’t believe the idea was really all that controversial even among non-Christians, once one peeled back airy egalitarian theory. As Lewis says in Mere Christianity:
As I have said, I am not married myself, but as far as I can see, even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to say ‘Poor Mr. X! Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about the way she does is more than I can imagine.’ I do not think she is even very flattered if anyone mentions the fact of her own ‘headship.’ There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule.
Nonetheless, Jacobs argues that Lewis’s views of male headship would be articulated quite differently were he alive today:
Arguments for the ordination of women were then rarely made by people committed to traditional Christian orthodoxy; that is why he brings into the argument the different question of whether it is appropriate to speak of God as ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ He assumes that people who want women to be ordained will also have serious reservations about all sorts of other beliefs that have historically constituted orthodoxy and that if we follow their recommendations we will find that we have ’embarked on a different religion’ than Christianity. What has emerged since Lewis’s death is a large body of orthodox Christians, many of whom revere C.S. Lewis and wish to promote traditional Christianity as vigorously as he did, who see no difficulty with the ordination of women. If Lewis were writing today, he would surely leave that subject alone, but in his time it had a different resonance, a different set of contexts.
Professor Jacobs assumes then that Lewis’s views on male headship were culturally conditioned, that he would not consider the matter as important if only he could see the orthodox Christian feminism of, what, Christians for Biblical Equality? The Wheaton College faculty?
What Jacobs fails to ask is whether contemporary Christian egalitarianism doesn’t bring with it the very theological concerns Lewis addresses not only in Mere Christianity but in “Priestesses in the Church.” After all, the Trinitarian problems are alive and well. Every interest group pushing for women’s ordination in contemporary Protestantism has pushed ultimately for some degree of “gender inclusive” God language, and some even the re-visioning of the God-world relationship. This is true within the evangelical feminist caucuses and certainly true within the old-line denominations.
The question should be, is there a reason why, until the onset of the contemporary feminist movement, those who argued for women’s ordination were rarely “committed to traditional Christian orthodoxy”? Could it be because male headship as part of the creation order reveals and explains something essential about the Fatherhood of God and the husbandry of Christ?
I heartily recommend Alan Jacobs’s book on Lewis (and his other books as well). But I also recommend that we take the opportunity to think through the reasons behind why Lewis considered male headship part of the “mere Christianity” corpus. These reasons are just as relevant now as in the 1940s and 1950s.
Would Lewis write now about male headship? Well, no one can know for sure about all the contingencies of history. But we can know something about the man himself. There are many people who would be calmed into writing nothing because of the triumph of a new idea among good Western Christians, even an idea so novel that no other generation of orthodox Christians would embrace it. But C.S. Lewis?
