Gordon H. Clark against C.S. Lewis

"Theories about Christ's death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important those theories are. My own church - the Church of England - does not lay down any one of them as the right one. The Church of Rome goes a bit further. But I think they will all agree that the thing itself is infinitely more important than any explanations that theologians have produced. I think they would probably admit that no explanation will ever be quite adequate to the reality." - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity



"Some people think that Christ died for our sins as an example to us of courage or martyrdom. His death exerts a moral influence on us. In this sense Christ died for our sins. But preaching the death of Christ in this sense never saved anyone. Those who study the history of theology know that there was a Patristic theory explaining that Christ paid his ransom to the devil. Hugo Grotius expounded a governmental theory. The evangelist does not preach the Gospel unless he expounds the Scriptural theory.
No evangelist can preach the Atonement without relying on a theory. The word Atonement itself is the name of and the result of a theory. The word Satisfaction, used earlier, and unfortunately replaced by the word Atonement, is also the name of and the result of a theory. It is the name of the Scriptural theory. And unless this theory is preached, the Atonement the Satisfaction, the Gospel is not preached." - Gordon H. Clark, What is the Christian Life?


I must say that Clark did not write this necessarily against Lewis but in context wrote this against John Stott