By Cathy Guiles

Staff Writer

Usually, Calvin's biennial Festival of Faith and Writing focuses on writers who are still living. One session at this year's Festival, however, drew an overflow crowd to hear about C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who died a decade later, attesting to the continued popularity and influence of these colleagues and friends and their work.

Professors Christopher Mitchell, director of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois that is home to the famous wardrobe that inspired the first of Lewis' ``Chronicles of Narnia'' series, and Ralph Wood of Baylor University in Texas delivered subsequent speeches April 19 in the Commons Lecture Hall. Mitchell emphasized the similarities between Tolkien and Lewis while Wood pointed out some of the important differences in how the writers thought God worked in the world.

According to Mitchell, ``confident agnosticism'' was the norm among other British writers of the time. Authors such as Virginia Woolf criticized Christianity and relied on agnosticism because it recognized all of the world's problems.

In response, Lewis, ``the most reluctant convert in all of England,'' set out to communicate ``the intellectual power of the Christian worldview, and the imaginative power of the Christian worldview,'' Mitchell said.

Although Tolkien was a life-long Catholic and had no distinct conversion experience while Lewis was an atheist for 30 years before undergoing a dramatic conversion and joining the Anglican church, they both set out to ``use imaginative literature in conveying Christian truth,'' Mitchell said. ``They show us that faith is imaginatively and rationally plausible.''

Wood then pointed out several crucial differences between the two writers, noting that modern readers tend to judge their relationship from Lewis' point of view.

First of all, Wood said, Tolkien was shy but easy-going and always willing to try a goofy stunt, while Lewis was an extrovert, always ready to argue, ``the hale and bluff figure who flattened his opponents.''

Secondly, Lewis did not labor over his writing like Tolkien did.

Lewis wrote quickly, not stopping to make many revisions or spending a lot of time coming up with creative names for the places and characters in his books.

Tolkien did just the opposite, painstakingly inventing locales and people with detailed, vague names.

Perhaps more significantly, the two had fundamentally different views of apologetics. Tolkien said Lewis was in way over his head and did not know enough to write about theology, dismissing him as ``Everyman's theologian'' (akin to one American calling another ``Joe Schmo's theologian.'')

According to Wood, because Tolkien was ``deeply Catholic through and through,'' he believed God needed no defense and that people cannot be argued into faith, or else it would be possible to argue them out of faith as well.

Therefore, Tolkien did not insist on a Christian reading of his books, setting out only to convey truth, not necessarily theology.

In contrast, Lewis emphasized autonomous choice in his writings, believing that ``we're the sum total of our decisions.'' Because Lewis had a conversion experience, he viewed this world as something being acted on by God from outside. In his books, humans have to travel into outer space or go through a wardrobe door in order to get to where God is.

But in Tolkien's books, the opposite is true. Wood explained, ``[In ``The Lord of the Rings'' triology] we are set down in the midst of Middle-earth, a realm whose ontological truthfulness needs no foundation beyond itself.''

Wood claimed that Tolkien and Lewis' characters also reflect their respective views of the church. Lewis' characters often act alone, without a community of faith to support them.

Conversely, Tolkien's heroes ``never act solitarily but always as the called out who are commissioned to a common task.''

One last difference between the two: Lewis was much more comfortable in the modern world than was Tolkien.

While Tolkien never drove a car, ``believed English history ended in 1066 and thought Shakespeare was a horribly modern writer,'' Lewis used technology such as radio to get his message across.

However, in spite of their differences, Lewis and Tolkien did agree on two important matters which have secured their place in Christian apologetics and literary history: ``their refusal to reduce Jesus to moral exemplar and historically interesting figure, and their awareness that the Gospel always remains a scandal and offense even to the noblest cultures and most civilized values.''