My wife and I just returned from a trip to England, Ireland and Scotland. One of our last stops was Oxford, home to the second oldest university in the world.

I have an unusual connection to Oxford. In the mid 1950s, my father, a U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, was made commanding officer of Royal Air Force Base Welford (the 2nd largest conventional weapons depot in Europe), just a few miles from Oxford. As the top dog, he and his family were required to live in the largest house on the base, a very old former monastery known as Poughley Priory. Our temporary “home” was founded in 1160 – less than a century after William the Conqueror became king of England in 1066. 

The Oxford connection is that this same priory was used by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey to start a college, called the “Cardinal’s College.” You might remember Wolsey – 500 years ago he was the chief advisor to King Henry VIII (remember him, the guy with 8 wives). Anyway, Wolsey fell out of grace with King Henry, and eventually his college was renamed “Christ Church College” at the University of Oxford in 1546. 

One of my favorite authors was a professor at Oxford – C.S. Lewis. Lewis was an atheist for much of his adult life until one of his colleagues, J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) convinced him that Jesus was no mere man, but God’s Son. 

Here’s a few of my favorite Lewis quotes:

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell…. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”

“There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,”’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’”

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

Interesting quotes coming from a former atheist. One of Oxford’s greatest thinkers has given us all something to think about.

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