Throughout the theological writings of C.S. Lewis, as in the mere fact of his practicing theology as an amateur, there is a critique—not of professionalism—but of rampant, one might say “total,” professionalization. Lewis saw how a society could come to rely inordinately on professionals and their expertise, to the detriment of both the society—weakened by the excessive fragmentation of knowledge and isolation of the individual—and the professionals themselves, increasingly reduced to mere technicians. This comes through in his defense of liberal education. In “Our English Syllabus,” he writes,

That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative. You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When the cow has finished eating she chews the cud; when she has finished chewing she sleeps; when she has finished sleeping she eats again. She is a machine for turning grass into calves and milk—in other words, for producing more cows. The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver building dams, nor the bee making honey. When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom, for if they could speak they would all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.

Lewis personally suffered the tyranny of professional values. He was passed over three times for a chair at Oxford, in spite of his well-regarded scholarship on medieval literature and unparalleled success as a lecturer. Helen Gardner, who wrote Lewis’s obituary for the British Academy, reported that among the faculty

a suspicion has arisen that Lewis was so committed to what he himself called ‘hot-gospelling’ that he would have had little time for the needs of what had become a very large undergraduate school and for the problems of organization and supervision presented by the rapidly growing numbers of research students in English Literature. In addition, a good many people though that shoemakers should stick to their lasts and disliked the thought of a professor of English Literature winning fame as an amateur theologian….

In Gardner’s explanation of Lewis’s failure to secure a chair, we see at work both the self-concern of the guild (“problems of organization,” the primacy of research) and a larger culture of “professionalization,” a suspicion of amateurism in general: “stick to your lasts,” that is, “stay in your lane.”

Lewis himself sometimes uses “amateur” as a mild term of abuse. In a letter, he dismisses contemporary literary criticism as a “welter of amateur psychology, amateur sociology, and expert perversity.” Elsewhere he dismisses another pair of interlocutors as “amateur philosophers.” But in context, we see that Lewis only rejects amateurism where it is being passed off as professionalism:

In filling their book with [a philosophical position] they have been unjust to the parent or headmaster who buys it and who has got the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians. A man would be annoyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head crammed with the dentist’s obiter dicta on bimetallism or the Baconian theory.

Lewis elsewhere acknowledges himself to be an amateur with respect to theology and argues that it enables him to make especially helpful contributions. For example, in his introduction to Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis writes,

The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in such a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t. In this book, then, I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained, when reading the Psalms, with the hope that this might at any rate interest, and sometimes even help, other inexpert readers. I am “comparing notes,” not presuming to instruct.

Unfortunately, Lewis’s amateur status has often been overlooked among evangelicals, especially in America. His reception in those circles has too often been of overawe at his Oxford pedigree and scholarly reputation, which is to say his largely irrelevant professional credentials. As Alister McGrath writes in The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis, “Lewis has been received and accepted as a theologian, despite allegedly not being a theologian. A large number of intelligent Christians have come to adopt Lewis as their theologian.”