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When the reader contrasts these two dialogues, the reader sees that Lewis had the greatest admiration for those to whom the doctrines of penal hell and penal atonement are immediately perceived to be palpably untrue and who instead cry exultant to God with a child-heart: ‘Do with me as thou wilt!’ Lewis did not believe that it was possible to be saved so long as you manage to evade God's justice by believing in a theology of penal atonement and penal hell! It is thus extremely ironic that Western Christians should laud Lewis as the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th Century, given that he admired those who rejected Western Christianity more than those who accepted itand regarded its doctrines as a hindrance to the salvation of its adherants. Lewis did not believe that it was possible to be saved so long as you manage to evade God's justice by believing in a theology of penal atonement and penal hell!
In short, Lewis was a universalist in the way that Orthodox Christianity teaches universalism, believing that God loves all his creatures now and throughout eternity, and we experience "hell" only insofar as, and so long as, we choose not to conform ourselves to Divine Love. Like the Orthodox, Lewis believed that we could repent beyond the grave and we could all hope for (but not predict with certainty) ''apokatastasis'', universal reconciliation of humanity to divine goodness (see ''The Great Divorce''). According to Lewis, a human is not required to accept any particular religious beliefs or doctrine in order to be "saved," (''ie.'' in order to turn from gloom to joy). A brilliant article on this matter is is [http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05292002-153921/unrestricted/etd.pdf Reason, Imagination, and Universalism in C. S. Lewis]
The late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a respected Calvinist theologian opined in Christianity Today, Dec. 20, 1963, that C.S. Lewis's view of salvation was "defective" because Lewis "was an opponent of the substitutionary and penal theory of the Atonement." Lloyd-Jones would have the very same criticism of Orthodox theology as represented by such theologians as Vladimir Lossky and Christos Yannaras. The Protestant and Roman Catholic penal theory of the atonement and its associated understanding of a penal hell is denied by the Orthodox and C.S. Lewis. See [http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html "Heaven & Hell in the Afterlife, According to the Bible."] See also the popular lecture [http://www.stnectariospress.com/parish/river_of_fire.htm "The River of Fire."]
Several other evangelicals became cognizant that Lewis's approach was different from theirs: A. N. Wilson asserted: "If the mark of a reborn evangelical is a devotion to the Epistles of Paul and, in particular, to the doctrine of Justification by Faith, then there can have been few Christian converts less evangelical than Lewis." J. I. Packer complained of Lewis’s "failure ever to mention justification by faith when speaking of the forgiveness of sins." Other Protestants who finally realize the unconventional doctrines Lewis was teaching announce that Lewis will be damned for his universalist theological tinkering. See [http://www.trinityfoundation.org/PDF/205a-DidCS.LewisGotoHeaven.pdf Did CS Lewis Go to Heaven?] Of course, as we have seen, Lewis would have welcomed this divine punishment because he trusted it to be purgatorialrather than penal.
Lewis had occasion to visit Greece and visit Orthodox churches there. C.S. Lewis has been quoted as saying that of all the liturgies he'd ever attended, Lewis preferred the Greek Orthodox liturgy to anything that he had seen in the West, Protestant or Roman Catholic. Lewis also claimed that of all the priests and monks that he had ever had the opportunity to meet, the Orthodox priests were the holiest, most spiritual men he had ever met. Lewis was also a sacramentalist, stating in ''Mere Christianity'' that: "There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names -- Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper."
