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Dwain Tissell

Abstract

Over the roughly sixty years since C. S. Lewis’s death, many have asked, what was the message he most wanted to convey? A decade before Lewis’s passing, Dr. James Houston asked him that very question. Lewis answered that he was fighting “reductionism.” More specifically, Houston heard C. S. Lewis to be most concerned about reduction of the value of the human person. At the time of this writing, Houston is 101 years of age, and he has kept a low profile all these years about his relationship with C. S. Lewis. From 1947 until 1954, he and Lewis were more than just passing acquaintances. In fact, Houston’s reputation as a friend of Lewis reached North America. He recalls that several American Christian scholars, including Carl Henry, Frank Gaebelien, and Clyde Kilby, asked him to introduce them to Lewis. His story is an example of those who, though lesser known to date by most Lewis researchers, had significant interactions with Lewis. Houston is the founder of Regent College in Vancouver, B. C., a graduate school in Christian studies. He is also co-founder of the C. S. Lewis Institute that started in Washington D.C. He sat for an oral history interview conducted on 2 October 2017 at his home in Vancouver, Canada, agreeing to put down his memories of Lewis for the historical record. The interview is now available at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Houston realizes public discussions of his memories of Lewis have been rare. In fact, the only other time he made a thorough statement of their years long association was during a talk given at the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society in 1982. 1 Still, he believes his experiences with Lewis are not only an important chapter of his own life, but valuable enough to get on the historical record as they will lead to new insights. Some environments where James Houston encountered C. S. Lewis have either not been reported by others who knew Lewis, or they were private encounters between Lewis and Houston.

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