What Reformed Christians Can Learn From C.S. Lewis

I argue that Lewis has much to help us in the Reformed camp to thinking about our faith in relationship to an unbelieving world. In this Lewis does belong to us. Read him with discernment as you would read any one, I keep telling people.
I will add what J.I. Packer (a low church Anglican on the Reformed side) wrote about Lewis:
“Lewis claimed no identity save that of a ‘mere Christian’, lay and untutored; but he was identifiably a High Church Anglican, orthodox and mainstream, whose Christian mind was shaped mainly by the heritage of Plato, Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas a Kempis, Richard Hooker, Thomas Traherne and William Law, plus the Scotsman George MacDonald. Apart from MacDonald, this roster of giants had been shaping Anglican minds long before Lewis’s day, and all that was distinctive to Lewis was his adhering to this heritage at a time when it was fashionable to leave it behind…
Since Lewis spoke so forthrightly for mainstream Christianity, and since historic evangelicals (Christians, that is, who find their identity within the Reformational-Puritan-Pentecostal mix) belong to the mainstream, it is hardly surprising that for many of them Lewis has something like icon status, despite his smoking and drinking, his belief in purgatory and his quite but decided sacramentalism, his use of confessional to keep himself honest, his non-inerrantist view of Scripture, and his unwillingness to speak of penal substitution and justification by faith alone when affirming forgiveness and salvation in Christ.
What evangelicals most love in Lewis is his depiction of Aslan, the Christly lion of Narnia; his strong defense of biblical supernaturalism, personal new birth, Christ’s return to judgment, the reality of Satan, heaven and hell, and the certainty that we all are inescapably en route for one or the other, according to what each does with such light from God reaches us…his stress on repentance and actual submission to Christ as the heart of Christianity; his openness about his conversion from atheism, and his concern to help others make the same journey; his mental vigour in seeking to make every thought captive to Christ by thinking out in terms of God’s revealed truth; and the wit, humour and playfulness with which he pursues this solemn task. Tuning in to all of this, evangelicals claim Lewis as essentially ‘one of us’- and who should want to stop them doing that? (“Living Truth For a Dying World: the Message of C.S. Lewis”, in J.I. Packer Collection, ed. Alister McGrath, pg. 272-273).
I still wonder why Lewis himself did not convert to Roman Catholicism like so many of his friends, if he was truly and decidedly on “their side.” I will be happy to still claim him as good guide for application of Christian truth. And keep Calvin as my helpful guide in understanding Biblical truth.