an obvious parallel," he says. "The more interesting thing is how does Lewis convey a sense of what the religious climate, the religious sensibility might be in another world? That is the teasing thing." Why turn Christ the lamb into Christ the lion? In his autobiography Surprised by Joy , Lewis writes about the exhilaration of his conversion from atheism to Christianity. There is a feeling, says Williams, "that something really quite fierce has taken hold of people" when they turn to God. "I've always connected it in my mind with T S Eliot's image of Christ the tiger in 'Gerontion' -- something springs on you." Fearsomeness is not a quality many people associate with the Church of England -- or indeed Williams. His evangelical enemies accuse him of being too wishy-washy and open-minded -- the same qualities that have led some secular intellectuals to claim him. (As one atheist put it to me: "We know he secretly doesn't really believe in all that Jesus and God stuff. He just thinks they're excellent metaphors.") Both sides fundamentally misread the Archbishop. In a recent review of the biblical scholar Gza Vermes's Christian Beginnings , which traces how the doctrine of the incarnation developed over time, he writes respectfully of a "beautiful and magisterial book". Yet he is firmly convinced that Jesus's followers regarded him as divine long before the Council of Nicaea decreed it in 325; and he writes with awe of "the divine life being clothed in human flesh and