This is Part 2 of An Address by C.S. Lewis at Oxford in 2025. If you haven’t yet read it, read that before reading this.

1. Question: “Your portrayal of the Lion, Aslan, seems inconsistent. In the books, he seems generally very gentle and kind, a little stern at times, but mostly quite tame. Now, suddenly, your tune seems to have changed. Your view of God/Aslan seems much less friendly. Why is that?”

There is always a temptation to fashion God into a creature after our own likeness — a domesticated deity whose only office is to approve us, whose commandments are soft suggestions, whose rebukes are faint, and whose holiness can be comfortably ignored. But the Living Christ is not such a house-pet god. He is the Lion of Judah who shakes the world with His roar, who speaks truth that burns through pretense, and who loves with a charity so fierce that it will not let us keep even the smallest sin that would hurt or destroy us.

The scriptures declare this plainly: “For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). And again, “The wicked shall not endure the presence of God… for the glory of God is intelligence” (cf. 1 Nephi 1:14; D&C 93:36). The brightness of His being reveals all things. His love is not manifest by indulgence but demonstrated by powerful teaching, chastening, and by offering opportunities to improve. He is in the business of facilitating positive transformation.

You may wish for a Christ who merely forgives, but the Scriptures present us with One who not only forgives but challenges us to repent, who commands us to repent, to put off the natural man, to be born again, to take up our cross daily, and to follow Him through suffering into glory (Luke 9:23; Mosiah 3:19). He is not tame. Nor is He safe. But He is good — perfectly, eternally good.

[Read: The Aslan Archetype, by Jared Eastley-> Click Here]

2. Question: Most secular Christians teach that we are saved by grace, not by works. What is your perspective on that?

It is not enough that we admire Christ or even believe in Him. Christ’s gospel is not theoretical. It is not merely intellectual. It is not an exercise in mere profession of belief. The great call is to become like Him. “Be ye holy,” says Peter, echoing Leviticus, “for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:15–16). Paul insists that we are to be “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). John affirms that when Christ appears, “we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2). The Book of Mormon echoes the same theme: “Come unto Christ, and be perfected in Him” (Moroni 10:32).

The purpose of mortality is not to remain what we are but to be refashioned, not into angels, not into abstractions, but into beings whose character is in alignment with Christ’s own. That is the central miracle of Christianity.

Let us banish the notion that heaven is a museum of forgiven sinners whose characters remain unchanged. Heaven is the dwelling place of sanctified souls, men and women whose hearts and minds have been made clean and holy by the grace of Christ, by repentance, by faith and obedience, who now delight in the very light that once condemned them.

3. Question: “Why is mortality so hard?”

If we are to become beings of light and holiness, then mortality cannot be easy or comfortable. Nor was it meant to be. The prophets tell us openly that affliction is the schoolmaster of the soul. Paul writes: “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

But God supports us in our trials. Nephi testified: “My God hath been my support… and hath filled me with His love, even unto the consuming of my flesh” (2 Nephi 4:20–21).

As we experience and overcome trials, we are increased in glory. Glory is the light and goodness that overcomes all pain, suffering, darkness, chaos, and opposition to happiness. The weight of glory is our ability to withstand, overcome, and maintain a fullness of joy even in the presence of darkness and suffering.

The “weight of glory” is not bestowed cheaply. It is learned and earned in the fiery furnace of experiencing affliction. We are given the opportunity to turn from darkness into the light as we experience the contradiction of our desires, in the humiliation of our pride, in the long struggle against sin that forces us to fall upon Christ’s light and mercy again and again.

Mortality is the anvil on which the soul is tempered. You are not here merely to be tried, but to be remade into something glorious and holy.

4. Question: “What do you think of the doctrine of predestination? Some claim that since all light and goodness emanates from God, God determines our ultimate actions and outcomes. What say you?”

If you will permit me, I must begin by sweeping away a very dangerous notion: the belief that because God is the source of all goodness, He must therefore be the cause of all our actions, whether noble or vile. This is a flattering philosophy for the sinner, for it turns his vices into fate and his failures into inevitabilities. But it reduces mankind to mere scenery in God’s theater and turns moral law into a kind of cosmic puppet show.

The prophets, ancient and modern, speak nothing of the sort. They portray a God who gives light, not compulsion; who grants power, not puppetry. Christ invites, warns, commands, pleads, but does not coerce. Even Aslan, if you will recall, never drags anyone by the scruff of the neck. He calls. He reasons. He persuades. He waits. But He does not unmake the very freedom He gave as His first gift.

The Book of Mormon is especially explicit on this matter. Lehi tells us plainly that “men are free… to choose liberty and eternal life… or to choose captivity and death” (2 Nephi 2:27). The word choose is not ornamental. It is the axis upon which salvation turns. God furnishes the possibilities, but we furnish the outcome.

Likewise, Jesus makes obedience the test of love: “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). If our deeds were predetermined, if righteousness were merely the firing of divine impulses through human matter, the very meaning of love would collapse into nonsense. Love that cannot choose is not love, but programming.

The idea that God determines our actions because all goodness originates in Him is like saying the existence of sunlight forces plants to grow in symmetrical rows. Sunlight enables growth, but it does not choreograph it. The seed still must choose to open, to reach, to receive. As the Book of Mormon puts it, we are invited to “act for ourselves and not be acted upon” (2 Nephi 2:26).

Predestination, at least in its more rigid forms, does violence to the dignity of the soul. It turns the moral universe into a forgone conclusion rather than a great drama in which character is truly forged, tested, and revealed. If God has already written your holiness or damnation before you draw breath, then commandments are farcical, repentance is theatrical, and judgment is a charade.

But the scriptures declare that judgment is real, responsibility weighty, and consequences eternal: “If ye do not keep the commandments… ye shall be cut off” (Helaman 15:7). “I, the Lord, cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance” (Alma 45:16). These are not the words of a playwright revealing the ending of a script we cannot alter; they are the urgent warnings of a Father whose children may yet perish, yet need not do so.

Indeed, the very ferocity with which Christ calls us to repentance presupposes that we might refuse Him. “He shall not save his people in their sins,” Alma declares, “but from their sins” (Alma 11:37). Salvation is not a divine rubber stamp but a divine surgery, but we must consent to the scalpel.

Grace is not God pretending we are righteous; it is God inviting us to be righteous and teaching us how to do so. The Lion will not carve virtue into an unwilling heart. He respects your agency precisely because He respects your eternal potential. A coerced righteousness would be no righteousness at all.

So then, what of predestination? If by the term one means that God has foreknowledge, endless patience, and an eternal plan by which all who freely choose Him will become like Him, then yes, the scriptures teach precisely that. But if one means that God determines our choices or fixes our fate before we have lived, loved, sinned, repented, or prayed, then one has wandered into a doctrine that both the Bible and the Book of Mormon uniformly reject.

You are not a pawn in the hands of Deity. You are a soul of staggering worth and potential for good, free to rise, free to fall, free to repent, free to refuse. Heaven would not have it otherwise.

For the Lion did not come to tame your will but to transform it, with your consent, into something radiant, courageous, and good.

5. Question: “The scriptures speak of swords that pierce and fires that refine. What are we to understand about the soul’s transformation through such fierce images?”

If you read the scriptures with any seriousness, you will notice that God rarely speaks of salvation in the language of comfort. He speaks instead of surgery and smithing: of cutting, pruning, melting, refining. This is not accidental. It is His way of telling us that the human soul is not a decorative object to be dusted but a living organism needing operation.

The trouble with much modern religion is that it imagines Jesus as a kindly pharmacist offering soothing balms for our minor aches. But the Christ of scripture is a surgeon, and not a sentimental one. He is the Good Physician precisely because He is willing to cut. And He is the Refiner because He is willing to burn. “The word of God… pierces even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit” (Hebrews 4:12). You cannot read that honestly and still expect Him merely to pat your hand.

The Book of Mormon sharpens the point. Alma describes the Spirit as “a burning fire” (Helaman 12), and Christ declares that His gospel will “purify… even as I am pure” (3 Nephi 27:20). Fire, in scripture, is not ornamental. It destroys what is corrupt and reveals what is true. It is both terror and mercy: a flame that consumes the dross but preserves the silver and gold.

God’s work in us is like that. When He calls us to repentance, He is not suggesting we rearrange the furniture. He is proposing a renovation so profound that the old self must die. I once wrote that God does not want to make us merely better men; He intends to make us new men. That requires removing things we cling to like barnacles: our pride, our grudges, our excuses, our secret allegiances to sin.

The Book of Mormon calls these things “the chains of hell,” and if we’re honest, we often polish those chains rather than break them. But God, in His love, breaks them by cutting and burning. “The natural man is an enemy to God… unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit” (Mosiah 3:19). Yielding is not painless. It is the surrender of stubborn flesh to the healing blade.

Imagine two kinds of pain: the wound that kills and the wound that heals. Christ’s sword is always the second. He wounds to heal. He pierces to cleanse. He burns to remake.

Faith invites the Surgeon in. Repentance lies still upon the table. Sanctification is the long, deliberate work by which Christ removes all that is false in us, and fills the space with His own life, His own light, His own character.

If you consent to this holy operation, you will indeed feel parts of yourself cut away. But these amputations are not punishments; they are redemption, deliverance, and freedom. Every slice liberates you from something unworthy of the divine being you are called to become.

We often ask God to make our lives easier. But He is trying to make our souls eternally good. And that cannot be built with the rotting timber of pride, deceit, or obstinate self-will. These must be burned away, not because He hates us, but because He loves us too fiercely to leave us in squalor.

So yes, the scriptures speak of swords and fire because heaven is not cheaply purchased. The Lion is relentless with sin. He refuses to let us remain as we are. We cannot remain static. We must constantly improve or diminish. We cannot stand still within the framework of mortality.

But if we submit, we will one day discover, to our awe, that what the fire removed was never truly ourselves…
and what it left shining was the beginning of a soul fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.

6. Question: “What of suffering? Why must we suffer so much as part of the process to be saved?”

If Christianity teaches anything at all, it is that suffering is not an unfortunate detour in the Christian life, it is the royal road by which souls are remade into something better. One might wish otherwise. We might prefer a gentler curriculum, something more like a spiritual spa than a forge. But Scripture is uncompromising: God shapes and improves His children in the tempest and in the fire.

You cannot read the New Testament and imagine that holiness can be acquired without cost. “Though He were a Son,” we are told, “yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). If Christ Himself—perfect, sinless, radiant—learned obedience through suffering, then it would be strange indeed if we, who are riddled with pride and vanity, expected to graduate without attending the same school.

The Book of Mormon agrees with striking clarity. Moroni teaches that faith grows only after “the trial of your faith” (Ether 12:6). Nephi forewarns that the righteous “shall be persecuted for righteousness’ sake” (2 Nephi 28:19). Alma speaks of the “mighty change” of heart—a change that does not come through comfort, but through confrontation with our own weakness (Alma 5:12–14).

The Book of Mormon teaches us that the Lord chastens His people for their benefit and learning.

“The Lord seeth fit to chasten His people; yea, He trieth their patience and their faith” (Mosiah 23:21). Not to punish them, but to prepare them. To enable them to “endure the presence of God” (1 Nephi 10:21).

Suffering is not evidence that God has abandoned us. It is evidence that He is near, very near, and at work. We are being carved, pruned, refined, forged. The Lion does not scratch without purpose; the Refiner does not heat the silver or gold beyond what it can bear.

The question, therefore, is not “Why does God let me suffer?” but rather: “Will I let this suffering make me holy, or will I let it make me bitter?”

Heaven is not achieved by avoiding suffering but by allowing suffering to do its sacred work. For in the end, the saints are not those who avoided sorrow, but those who learned to meet sorrow with faith, hope, and charity—and were thereby remade into beings fit for a far greater and eternal weight of glory.

7. Question: “What place do ordinances and rituals appropriately have in worship and spiritual development?”

The danger is not that ritual is bad, but that ritual is easy, and so it is often used as a substitute for inner change.

If we are not careful, ritual becomes the most attractive counterfeit of Christianity, a kind of spiritual theater in which we may applaud ourselves without ever really improving. The prophets saw this danger ages ago. Jesus warned of those who “draw near with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Matthew 15:8). Nephi lamented a people who “teach with their learning” but “deny the power of God” (2 Nephi 28:26). And the Book of Mormon labels such outward performances “dead works” when the heart remains unbroken (Alma 12:37; Moroni 7:6–11).

Again, the problem is not the ritual. It is the heart that hides behind the ritual.

Ritual is easy; repentance is not. Ceremony is predictable; sanctification is costly. One may perform an ordinance without surrendering a single sin; one cannot come to Christ without surrendering all of them.

Ordinances and rituals, when rightly understood, are not magic. They are symbols and teaching points. They are meant to add motion and objectivity to our faith. When properly performed and properly appreciated, they can intensify our focus, thus reenergizing and amplifying our faith. When performed or understood improperly, they destroy faith, mostly because they become idolatrous objects of our faith, rather than labor and improvement faith should inspire.

“Rend your hearts, and not your garments,” the prophet says (Joel 2:13). In other words: do not confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. A wedding ring does not make a marriage; a temple does not make a saint; an ordinance does not produce holiness. Faith in Christ makes these things. We must do as He asks and make the improvements in our lives that He requires. Ordinances and rituals are not shortcuts; they are meant to be pointers to Him.

8. Question: “Why do you say that for some standing in the presence of the Lord will be a terror?”

There are two reactions to the presence of Christ: joy or terror. Joy for the righteous whose hearts are clean, terror for those who have clung to sin. Not because Christ despises them, but because the brightness of His truth reveals everything that is false within them.

When confronted by the enormity of the pain and suffering our sins have caused, it is overwhelming and horrifying.

The Psalmist writes: “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart” (Psalm 24:3–4). Jacob teaches that the righteous “shall have a perfect knowledge of their enjoyment,” while the wicked shall have “a perfect knowledge of their guilt” (2 Nephi 9:14).

The presence of God does not change us; it reveals us. Heaven is not a reward for the good; it is a habitation suited only to the good. Hell is not a prison to which God casts the wicked; it is the condition created by a soul that refuses the transforming love of Christ. Hell is the awareness of the suffering one’s sins have caused. This suffering is metaphorically referred to as the fires of hell. The darkness is where souls such as these fly to, trying to escape the light and all-piercing eyes of Almighty God. Sinners filled with guilt want as much distance as possible between God and them.

Please understand that when the Lion comes in glory, His light will be joy to the honest and agony to the dishonest. Therefore, choose honesty now. Choose repentance now. Choose Christ now, for eternity begins with today’s decisions.

9. Question: “How can we prepare to make heaven our home?”

In the end, the whole labor of Christian discipleship can be put into a single sentence: Christ is calling us home. Not merely to a place, but to a condition—a way of being, a purity of soul, a life capable of dwelling joyfully in the presence of unfiltered truth.

Heaven is the realm where God’s nature is the atmosphere; therefore, only those who share that nature can breathe its air. And so, Christ calls to us through conscience, through suffering, through our longing for goodness, through our weariness of sin. These are not interruptions to life but invitations—God’s own methods of reshaping us into creatures fit for glory.

To prepare for heaven is simply to become the sort of soul that would feel at home there: truthful, humble, courageous, repentant, charitable, and surrendered utterly to the One who makes all things new.

As the risen Christ proclaimed, “I am the light… therefore hold up your light” (3 Nephi 18:24). To hold up His light is to let His life become ours.

And so the Lion calls—firmly, faithfully, fiercely.
The question is no longer whether He speaks.
It is whether we will rise and follow.