C. S. Lewis on blogging

Well, perhaps not directly. But I found this quote from God in the Dock on another blogger's blog about the proliferation of "Christian" blogs that read more like Republican blogs in the name of God. Which doesn't necessarily follow.

At any rate, this is one of the reasons I love C. S. Lewis: for saying things I think or have been trying to say for years in a manner befitting, rather than my halted and stumbling ramblings on same. Our way to evangelize or to glorify God is not to be the loudest or the most strident or the most obnoxious. It is to strive to reflect our God in whatever situation or field we find ourselves, like Daniel and his friends who rose above the crowd in Babylon, trusting that the excellence we can bring to any situation is God's excellence. Who's greatness can shine more than His?

And there I go a'ramblin. Why don't you read Lewis instead? He's better.

I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work.

The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication.

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians about other subjects--with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way around. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books.

In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. The first step to the re-conversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians. . . Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly.
--C. S. Lewis, "Christian Apologetics," in C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970, pp. 89-103. Quote is from p. 93.