I recently led a class at my congregation, La Casa de Cristo Lutheran Church, on C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It’s a clever, insightful series of correspondence between Screwtape, a mentor devil, and his apprentice, Wormwood.
Whether you believe in a real cadre of devils or not (Lewis did), you should find the book to be a worthwhile look at all the temptations we face that pull us away from God and good. Throughout the book, Screwtape emphasizes that his main strategy is to get a person to focus on himself or herself and away from God and others. To Lewis, hell exists, and each inhabitant’s attention will be turned in totally on himself. The way to train a person for hell is to start developing that habit during his lifetime.
Below are links to the study guides I developed for the class. They’re really nothing more than a distillation of the major points from each chapter. For the first week, because no one had yet had a chance to read the book, we reviewed some common themes that appear throughout all of Lewis’s Christian writings.
Beneath the study guides, you’ll find links to blog posts containing other study guides I’ve written for previous classes.
The Screwtape Letters, Week One
The Screwtape Letters, Week Two
The Screwtape Letters, Week Three
The Screwtape Letters, Week Four
The Screwtape Letters, Week Five
The Screwtape Letters, Week Six
Here are links to other C. S. Lewis study guides that might interest you:
The Problem of Pain
Miracles
And here are study guides for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.
