Dr. Michael Gleghorn explains how C.S. Lewis’s pivotal role in this debate club shaped his huge contribution to Christian thought.
The Origins of the Oxford Socratic Club
In our day C. S. Lewis is probably best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as several important popular-level works of Christian apologetics. Yet he was also a formidable speaker and debater. He loved the dynamic “back-and-forth” of intellectual engagement with others over interesting and substantive issues. One of the most important outlets for this aspect of Lewis’s personality was the Oxford Socratic Club. For about thirteen years, from 1942 to 1954, Lewis served as the first president of this club. The significance of Lewis’s contribution to its success can scarcely be overestimated. According to Christopher Mitchell, “no other activity that Lewis engaged in has proven more beneficial and far-reaching in its influence on Christianity than his participation in the Socratic Club.”{1}
So what was the Oxford Socratic Club, why was it started, and what role did Lewis play in it? According to Walter Hooper, it was in late 1941 that a female undergraduate student at Somerville College in Oxford complained to Miss Stella Aldwinkle about the lack of any clubs for the serious discussion of “questions agnostics raised about God.”{2} Now Miss Aldwinkle was a force to be reckoned with. Having recently joined the Oxford pastoral staff, she immediately posted a notice on the Somerville college notice-boards inviting “all atheists, agnostics, and those disillusioned about religion” to meet and discuss the issue.{3}
The meeting was well-attended, and many good questions were asked. It was soon decided “that what was needed was an open forum for the discussion of the intellectual difficulties connected with religion in general and with Christianity in particular.”{4} The formation of an official university club, however, would require a president. After much consideration, Miss Aldwinkle wrote to C. S. Lewis about the issue. Lewis had already published several well-received books by this time and, according to Hooper, “was on the eve of becoming the most popular lay theologian in England.”{5} Upon receiving her letter, Lewis immediately responded by return mail saying, “This club is long overdue! Come to coffee in my rooms on Tuesday, and we can talk it over.”{6}
After meeting with Miss Aldwinkle, Lewis accepted the position as president and the Oxford Socratic Club was officially founded “shortly before Christmas of 1941.”{7} In January 1942, the club held its first official meeting.
Lewis’s Vision for the Oxford Socratic Club
Imagine for a moment a weekly meeting where “atheists, agnostics, and those disillusioned about religion”{8} could come together with intelligent Christians to discuss and debate their concerns about the claims of Christianity. This, it turns out, is largely what the Oxford Socratic Club became, under the able leadership of C. S. Lewis and Stella Aldwinkle. From its beginning in 1942, Lewis was excited about the club, and in his Preface to the first edition of the Socratic Digest he set forth his vision for the club’s purpose and goals.
According to Lewis, “Socrates had exhorted men to ‘follow the argument wherever it led them’: the club came into existence to apply his principle to one particular subject-matter—the pros and cons of the Christian religion.”{9} Lewis noted the uniqueness of the club, observing that, so far as he knew, no other society “had ever before been formed for such a purpose.” He stressed the value of the club as a place where people could hear the very best arguments and evidence available, discussed in a civil manner by sincere advocates for the various positions.
Making use of gladiatorial imagery, Lewis went on to describe the club as an “arena” in which the contestants met to engage in intellectual battle. Indeed, he said, “It was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the challenge.”{10} He admitted that those who founded the club were not “neutral” about the great issues which they regularly met to consider. But he claimed that argument itself is impartial: “It has a life of its own,” he noted. “No man can tell where it will go.” And all who entered that arena met to face one another in honest (and sometimes passionate) argument.
The club’s committee did their best to find intelligent atheists, agnostics, and others to come and address the club. According to Hooper, “it was the practice of the club to have two speakers at each meeting.” The first speaker would read a paper and the second would offer a reply. At that point, the meeting would be “thrown open to general discussion.” An effort was also made to keep everything fair, so if the first speaker was a Christian, an atheist or agnostic would be asked to respond (and vice-versa).{11} As one might expect, this format regularly resulted in some “bang-up” discussions about some of the most important issues of the day that had bearing upon the Christian faith.
Lewis as Speaker at the Oxford Socratic Club
By all accounts C. S. Lewis was a very gifted speaker. He had a deep sonorous voice and an impressive ability to make even the most difficult topics readily accessible. He is said to have always had just the right word at his disposal, and his ability to illustrate his points with nearly perfectly chosen analogies and examples from everyday life and experience was remarkable.{12}
The Oxford Socratic Club was originally founded near the end of 1941 and began meeting early in 1942. Although Lewis had accepted the position as president of the club, and although he held this position for about thirteen years, Hooper notes that Lewis was the primary speaker “on only eleven occasions” during that time.{13}
But Lewis made much of those occasions, using his considerable speaking gifts as a Christian scholar to address a wide variety of issues during his tenure as president of the Socratic Club. For example, he spoke on “Christianity and Aesthetics,” which probably dealt, in some form or fashion, with a Christian perspective on the nature of beauty, art and literature. He also spoke about issues surrounding ethics and Christian doctrine, science and miracles, the nature of argument, theology and poetry, the doctrine of the resurrection, the nature of reason, the importance of religious doctrine, the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the nature of faith and evidence.{14}
To offer just one example, on February 8, 1943, Lewis read a paper with the title, “If We Have Christ’s Ethics, Does the Rest of the Christian Faith Matter?”{15} Lewis began by observing the great commonality in the moral values and duties endorsed by virtually all civilizations and cultures throughout history. The upshot of this is that “Christian moral principles” are substantially the same as all other “moral principles.” He then noted that in spite of such agreement about these principles, humanity is plagued by a universal inability to consistently put them into practice. He concluded by arguing that it is “the rest of the Christian faith” that tells us how we might practice, rather than simply discuss and debate, the moral duties we all recognize as objectively binding.
Clearly Lewis was a gifted speaker. But even when he was not the primary speaker for the evening, he was still an important participant at the Oxford Socratic Club.
Lewis as Participant at the Oxford Socratic Club
If you like a good debate, you would have loved the Oxford Socratic Club. C. S. Lewis served as its first president from 1942 to 1954. Wanting to make room for others, he was the primary speaker only eleven times during those years.{16} But even when he was not the primary speaker, Lewis often played an important role at the meetings. Indeed, as president, he was often asked to offer the first response to whoever had addressed the assembly that evening.
Lewis relished the opportunity to engage with others over the intellectual challenges to Christianity. According to Christopher Mitchell, visiting speakers “typically viewed Lewis as a fearless and formidable opponent, yet equally ‘generous’ in argument. He was admired for the intellectual rigor he brought to each topic . . . and was known both for his ‘courage’ and ‘open-mindedness.’”{17}
By far the most famous encounter between Lewis and a visiting speaker occurred in 1948, when Lewis squared off against the young Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Anscombe read a paper criticizing Lewis’s argument against Naturalism, which had been published the previous year in his book, Miracles. Lewis had argued that Naturalism could not possibly be true because it claimed that human reason had arisen through a purposeless and unguided series of “irrational” physical causes. But if this were so, claimed Lewis, if reason was really a product of “irrational causes,” then we could have no good reason for believing its conclusions to be true—and hence, no good reason for believing its conclusions about Naturalism to be true.{18}
In response, Anscombe claimed that an important distinction must be observed between the “grounds” or “reasons” for a person’s belief, and the physical “causes” leading up to that belief. She said that “if a man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and they are genuinely his reasons, for thinking something—then his thought is rational, whatever causal statements we make about him.”{19} Although some took Lewis’s side in the debate that evening, and others sided with Anscombe, a story arose that Lewis was subsequently discouraged by this encounter.
Whatever the truth might be, Lewis later revised the chapter in Miracles that Anscombe had criticized. And though she still had criticisms of the chapter, she also thought it superior to the original version and appreciated Lewis’s “honesty and seriousness” in so revising it.{20}
The Importance of the Oxford Socratic Club
Would you value a club whose purpose was to carefully consider some of the most important issues of the day, and their bearing upon the Christian faith? Under the leadership of C. S. Lewis, this is what the Oxford Socratic Club purposed to do. Although there were clubs “catering to practically every conceivable interest,” there was nothing quite like the Socratic Club.{21}
From its inception the club was intended to be a place where students could gather to hear scholars from various disciplines debate a wide range of issues bearing (in one way or another) upon the Christian faith. This was followed by an opportunity for the students to raise questions and participate in robust discussion about these issues with all who were present. Given Lewis’s formidable skills as a speaker and debater, he was (from the first) a major attraction for the students. As Christopher Mitchell observes, “At a time when many had begun to believe Christianity was dying, if not already dead, as a plausible system of belief, the Socratic Club reasserted the intellectual vitality and integrity of the Christian faith.”{22} As one can well imagine, this was a key benefit for university students who were daily exposed to new ideas about the world, the nature of humanity, and our place in the universe.
Mitchell notes that after weekly meetings, some students would gather together and “sit up, often until 2 in the morning, going through all the discussions” from the evening.{23} The students were often particularly interested in what Lewis had said. “By retracing the points of Lewis’s argument, they began to detect the fallacies of current objections” to the Christian faith.{24} This was another key benefit that students received through regular participation in the club. They learned to think carefully, honestly, and methodically about the latest objections to Christianity.
By learning to reason their way through some of the most common objections to the faith for themselves (in light of Lewis’s helpful example, of course), students were helped to see Christianity as a reasonable worldview that could offer good answers to the hard questions put to it by skeptics. “By breaking down the intellectual prejudices to Christianity, Lewis freed many to reaffirm a faith they had lost confidence in, and for some he made faith in Christianity plausible for the first time.”{25} This, undoubtedly, was the most important legacy of C. S. Lewis’s leadership of the Oxford Socratic Club.
Notes
1. Christopher W. Mitchell, “University Battles: C. S. Lewis and the Oxford University Socratic Club,” in Lightbearer in the Shadowlands: The Evangelistic Vision of C. S. Lewis, ed. Angus J. L. Menuge (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1997), 329.
2. Walter Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 137.
3. Stella Aldwinkle, “Socrates was a Realist,” in Socratic Digest (No. 1), June 1943; cited in Mitchell, “University Battles,” 331.
4. Mitchell, “University Battles,” 331.
5. Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” 138.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Aldwinkle, “Socrates was a Realist,” cited in Mitchell, “University Battles,” 331.
9. C. S. Lewis, “Preface,” in Socratic Digest (No. 1), cited in Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” 138. The entire discussion here is indebted to Lewis’s Preface.
10. Ibid., and so for all quotations in this paragraph.
11. Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” 139-40.
12. Mitchell, “University Battles,” 340.
13. Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” 141.
14. Ibid., 174-85.
15. See the summary of Lewis’s talk in the Socratic Digest (No. 1, p. 23), cited in Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” 143-44. This paragraph is indebted to the discussion found there.
16. Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” 141. This paragraph is indebted to the discussion found there.
17. See Mitchell, “University Battles,” 340.
18. Ibid., 342.
19. I am quoting from Anscombe’s essay, “Reply to Lewis” (1948), as provided in Arend Smilde, “Appendices to ‘What ewis really did to Miracles,’ available at www.lewisiana.nl/anscombe/appendices.pdf. Smilde is drawing from G.E.M. Anscombe, The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1981), 224-32.
20. Ibid. This quote is taken from Anscombe’s “Introduction” to The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe,
Vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1981), vii-x. The “Introduction” is also provided by Smilde, mentioned in the previous note.
21. Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” 140.
22. Mitchell, “University Battles,” 346.
23. Ibid., 347.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
©2026 Probe Ministries
Dr. Michael Gleghorn
Dr. Michael Gleghorn is both a research associate with Probe Ministries and an instructor in Christian Worldview at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona.. He earned a B.A. in psychology from Baylor University, a Th.M. in systematic theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Theological Studies (also from Dallas Theological Seminary). Before coming on staff with Probe, Michael taught history and theology at Christway Academy in Duncanville, Texas. Michael and his wife Hannah have two children: Arianna and Josiah. His personal website is michaelgleghorn.com.
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