Screwtape Letters Summary

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Notes on The Screwtape Letters
Bill King, Lutheran Campus Pastor, Virginia Tech

The following comments are intended to be a distillation, commentary, and reflection on the major themes of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. I hope these notes will be helpful for those charged with leading a study of the book, particularly for students or others who have had minimal theological training. Chapter comments are more extensive in the beginning because Lewis introduces themes early and tends to return to them as the book progresses. Page references are to the HarperCollins 2001 paperback edition. Chapter 1 One of Lewis’ major concerns throughout the book is the intellectual assumptions of his world. At the beginning he notes a “materialist”
Screwtape emphasizes that the demonic is always about “fuddling”, that is, obscuring what is really important in favor of the transitory, ill conceived, or tawdry. Lewis clearly believes that faith has nothing to fear from reason rigorously applied, but his is not the reason of materialism or scientism. Chapter 2 Screwtape takes the church as an example where Wormwood can cause confusion by getting his patient so focused on the immediate and “real” that he loses sight of the transcendent. The Church is both more and less than the immediate manifestation of any one time and place. One will inevitably be disillusioned if one compares the immediate incarnation of the Church to the ideal toward which it strives. The doctrine of the Incarnation is bigger than the idea that God was in Christ; it also speaks to the concept that the holy is found (however imperfectly) in the real world of imperfect humans. There is a certain tension here. While God is indeed in the imperfect,that is not an excuse for making no effort to have our lives and our community grow into the image of Christ. (As the Scottish New Testament professor told his class, “We do indeed have this treasure in
In this chapter (though it is not the main focus) he gives us some examples. In the first paragraph he makes it clear that Wormwood is not dealing with a world where he can expect any slack, forgiveness, or grace. He will be held rigidly accountable for failure and can expect no understanding from his mentors. On page 17 he describes God as “cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours...” This theme occurs repeatedly in Screwtape, that God is more concerned about redemption of a beloved creation than guarding divine dignity. In the “through the looking glass” world of this book, the implication is that those who are on the side of the “Enemy” will also have a certain disregard for their own image and false dignity. And if Hell is a place where one can expect no quarter; the unspoken statement is that the realm of the Enemy is different. The major focus of the chapter is prayer, and Lewis warns of both extremes: making prayer into a purely “spiritual” matter with no anchoring or understanding of its necessary connection to the physical bodies which we inhabit, or on the other hand, of forgetting that no image of God is adequate. One might expect someone who has been nurtured by the single best collection of liturgical prayers in English (the Book of Common Prayer) to defend formal, structured prayer, and he does (15). Too often