GroshLink

As an encouragement in ministry, a friend on InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's Graduate & Faculty Ministry team emailed the below quote by C.S. Lewis on latent Christianity (Thank-you Kevin!)

A professor recently pointed to the fragrance of Christ emanating from followers of Christ on campus being the compelling witness of enabling other members of the campus community to glimpse God and explore following Christ with the People of God. C.S. Lewis' interaction with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien serves as an excellent illustration of such an initiation into the Kingdom of God.  One's relationship with God, or lack of relationship, shapes a way of life which overflows into all aspects of one's life, even one's vocation.

We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted.  As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects -with their Christianity latent.  You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him.  But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. -- C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics