ABSTRACT: C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man and Ransom Trilogy offer unique insights for Christians aiming to recover a biblical anthropology amid a secular society. In these works, Lewis demonstrates the futility of mankind’s pursuit of self-determination — a pursuit that subverts the foundations of goodness, truth, and beauty (what Lewis calls the “Tao”) while also depending on those foundations for any sense of coherence. At the same time, he points the way toward the anthropological rescue we need. Lewis’s three lectures in The Abolition of Man correspond to the three books of the Ransom Trilogy, which work out the consequences of his ideas in narrative fiction.
For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and scholars, we asked Louis A. Markos (PhD, University of Michigan), Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, to explore C.S. Lewis’s diagnosis of the core mistakes of contemporary anthropology in The Abolition of Man and his Ransom Trilogy.
