God in the Dock

Infobox Book
name = God in the Dock
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author = C. S. Lewis
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country = United Kingdom
language = English
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subject = Christianity
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media_type = Paperback
pages = 346
isbn = 0-8028-0868-9
preceded_by = Selected Literary Essays
followed_by = Of Other Worlds

"God in the Dock" is a collection of essays and speeches from C. S. Lewis. Its title implies "God on Trial", [For those unfamiliar with the English phrase "" (defendants are placed in a "dock" -- a half height open topped box)] and is based on an analogy made by Lewis suggesting that modern human beings, rather than seeing themselves as standing before God in judgment, prefer to place God on trial while acting as his judge.

The collection covers a wide range of topics, but focuses primarily on Lewis' view of Christianity.

Despite his intellect (or maybe because of it; realizing that the common man needed such things), Lewis' arguments are really aimed at the understanding of the common man, rather than the over-educated theologian.

This book was originally published as "Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics" in the UK, whilst a shorter book published by Fontana in 1979, entitled "God in the Dock: Essays on Theology" does not include many of the essays in this larger collection.

Lewis had already noted a distinct split between the religious and secular observance of Christmas. In "Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus", Lewis relates as satire the observance of two simultaneous holidays in "Niatirb" (Britain backwards) from the supposed view of the Greek historian and traveller. One, "Exmas", is observed by a flurry of compulsory commercial activity and expensive indulgence in alcoholic beverages. The other, "Crissmas," is observed in Niatirb's temples. Lewis's narrator asks a priest "why they kept Crissmas on the same day as Exmas?" He receives the reply:

:"It is not lawful, O Stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left." And when I asked him why they endured the Rush, he replied, "It is, O Stranger, a racket. . . "

In the chapter "Evil and God," Lewis refers to "mellontolatry", or the worship of the future. He believes this to be unproductive since the future is simply where the world is going, that is, a random walk. He believes that the world can hardly congratulate itself for having "arrived" at a future that is simply a place it has got to.

Footnotes