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Voted #14 by Premier Radio listeners as part of ‘The 100 Books That Changed the Church’ list curated by Premier Christianity magazine and Eden.
To read The Screwtape Letters is to watch yourself being watched. That is its genius — and why Premier Christianity places it among the books that have most shaped the Church. C.S. Lewis inverts the normal perspective entirely: instead of a Christian writing about resisting temptation, we have a senior devil, Screwtape, writing tactical letters to his bumbling junior nephew Wormwood about how to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian.
The effect is disorienting and clarifying at once. Lewis exposes the small, incremental nature of spiritual decline — the almost imperceptible drift from prayer to distraction, from generosity to resentment, from humility to spiritual pride. He shows how temptation rarely comes in dramatic form, but instead in the grey, everyday texture of how we treat the people we live with and how we spend a Tuesday afternoon.
There is wit here too — Screwtape's bureaucratic irritation at the inefficiency of his nephew is genuinely funny. But the laughter catches in your throat because you recognise yourself so precisely in the human soul being fought over.
Dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien, it remains one of the most re-readable books in the Christian canon.
Want to know more about the full list then read our blog article here.
About the Author: C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a literary scholar at Oxford and Cambridge and one of the greatest Christian communicators of the twentieth century. Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Surprised by Joy and the Chronicles of Narnia are among his other enduring works.
