CS Lewis on immortality

Like many people in the past decades, I owe a significant debt to CS Lewis as an agent of my conversion to Christianity. Lewis is more than a beloved and much pondered writer for me - he is more like a friend. 

Nonetheless; beyond the basic fact of that conversion (which is, after all, the main thing), I also absorbed from CSL several elements of what I now regard as serious error, especially in terms of the ultimate question of "what Christianity is". 

Even before I became a Christian, and for a good while afterwards (many months, and indeed residually for some years) I would have subscribed to this statement by CS Lewis's in Surprised by Joy. The bolded sections I have added for emphasis: 

My conversion involved as yet no belief in a future life. I now number it among my greatest mercies that I was permitted for several months, perhaps for a year, to know God and to attempt obedience without even raising that question [i.e. the question of whether - and how - there was a connection between God and Joy]. 

My training was like that of the Jews, to whom He revealed Himself centuries before there was a whisper of anything better (or worse) beyond the grave than shadowy and featureless Sheol. And I did not dream even of that. 

There are men, far better men than I, who have made immortality almost the central doctrine of their religion; but for my own part I have never seen how a preoccupation with that subject at the outset could fail to corrupt the whole thing. 

I had been brought up to believe that goodness was goodness only if it were disinterested, and that any hope of reward or fear of punishment contaminated the will. If I was wrong in this (the question is really much more complicated than I then perceived) my error was most tenderly allowed for. I was afraid that threats or promises would demoralise me; no threats or promises were made. The commands were inexorable, but they were backed by no "sanctions". 

God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. Long since, through the gods of Asgard, and later through the notion of the Absolute, He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what it can do to us but for what it is in itself. That is why, though it was a terror, it was no surprise to learn that God is to be obeyed because of what He is in Himself. 

If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, "I am." To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him. In His nature His sovereignty de jure is revealed.

**

Lewis explains that it was a good thing for him - implicitly in a psychological sense:

1. That he was unconcerned by the question of immortality: of life beyond mortal life.

2. That he regarded his faith essentially as obedience; and obedience to a God to whom obedience was due impersonally - because he was God - (which I take to mean, the creator of everything from nothing, omnipotent, omniscient etc.)  - and without consideration of any personal values. 

And it seems clear, and Lewis himself confirms, that this attitude to God is closely analogous to that of Judaism - and, he might have added, to Islam.   

Lewis even goes so far as to say that it is corrupting to religion for "personal immortality" to be the central doctrine. 

Unfortunately (as it now seem to me) I imbibed this personal prejudice of Lewis's along with my conversion. Consequently, I found that reading the Fourth Gospel was extremely confusing - since it seemed obvious that "immortality" (of a particular kind - resurrected) was the focus of Jesus's teaching. 

(There are also accounts, which impress me, that suggest immortality was a primary means of conversion.) 

I am forced to conclude that Lewis's personal history and psychology led him into a very serious misunderstanding of Christianity - but I would add that it is not at all uncommon and I had exactly the same misconception. 

And for much the same reason - in that I became a Christian via monotheism. That is, through intermediate stages of recognizing that we inhabited "a creation", and recognizing the reality of transcendental values (truth, beauty, virtue, cohesion)...

In other words, again much like Lewis, I regarded the history of Christianity as essentially cumulative, and the nature of Christianity as added-on to pre-existent Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. 

I now regard this as deeply wrong, in its essentially reality. Of course Jesus lived at a point in time, in which there were pre-existent cultural and religious realities. 

But I now see Jesus as offering something fundamentally simple (eternal, Heavenly, resurrected life), and qualitatively new - a second creation. 

I see the intellectual structures of pre-existent Hebrew monotheism and Greek philosophy as not just irrelevant but distorting to the real nature of the religion of Jesus Christ. 

In particular; it seems like bad advice to suggest that people ought not to be concerned with the question of immortality; and that we ought not to try and understand the relationship between their own values and the nature of God. Such ideas point away-from (not towards) Christianity as it ought to be understood - the teaching of Jesus Christ revealed in the Fourth Gospel; and (much more importantly) an understanding which is simple and clear enough to be knowable by direct personal revelation.