C.S. Lewis Warned Us About Close Encounters of the Evangelical Kind
If UFOs are real, exercise some humility before sharing the gospel.
A Las Vegas family called 911 in April to report a disturbance in their backyard. The city has its share of crime so that couldn’t have surprised the emergency dispatcher too much, but then the man on the phone said, “They’re not human.”
The beings, he said, were 8 feet or maybe 9 or 10 feet tall, with big, shiny eyes.
“They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can’t explain it, and big mouth,” he said. “They’re 100 percent not human.”
Police responded but they didn’t find aliens or spaceship—just one freaked-out family. Leaving the house, one of the officers said, “If those 9-foot beings come back, don’t call us alright?”
Stories of close encounters have been lent some credence in recent days by official reports that the Pentagon and NASA are both studying “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” the fancy alternative title for undefined flying objects. Recently a whistleblower came out with claims the US government has secretly recovered and hidden “craft of unknown origin.”
If there are aliens in our collective backyard, I want to know: Where are they from? How did they get here? Are they friendly?
And as a Christian, I have another question: Should I share the gospel with them?
That may seem like a question only a theologian from the future could address, but C. S. Lewis was wrestling with the idea decades before the United States and the Soviet Union began to compete to send people into space.
Lewis’s investigation of the theological questions that would be raised by an alien encounter began when he was a child. He was captivated by H. G. Wells and science fiction space adventures.
“The …